Visa has announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to enable secure Visa payments within agentic commerce, facilitating seamless and trusted transactions across OpenAI's platform. The partnership, unveiled at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, integrates Visa's global network, credentialing capabilities, and security infrastructure to support agentic commerce experiences. This initiative is designed to help consumers and businesses interact and transact with confidence as AI agents become active participants in the economy.

The collaboration falls under the broader Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative, which focuses on extending secure payment capabilities into new digital environments. Visa and OpenAI will explore enterprise applications, including developer-focused experiences powered by Codex and automated conversational workflows. By integrating Visa's payment capabilities into OpenAI experiences, developers and merchants gain a streamlined way to accept Visa payments initiated by agents.

Visa will provide the underlying network, tokenization, and risk capabilities necessary to support these transactions. The system will operate within clearly defined user permissions, policies, and controls, such as spending limits, merchant categories, and required approvals. Transactions will utilize tokenized Visa credentials alongside real-time authorization and fraud monitoring to maintain strong security and consumer protection.

"AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did," said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Visa. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless. That's the infrastructure we're building with partners like OpenAI."

Marco Mahrus, Head of Partnerships, Commerce at OpenAI, highlighted the expanding role of agents in financial tasks. "Commerce is going to happen in many more places and in many more ways than it does today, and agents will play an increasingly important role in helping people complete tasks that involve money," said Mahrus. "By integrating with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we're building the infrastructure for secure, transparent, and user-controlled agentic transactions."

Key Partnership Features

The partnership aims to build the foundation for secure AI-enabled payment experiences, ensuring that as commerce evolves, transactions remain safe and user-controlled.

A US judge has approved a $38 billion settlement for Visa and Mastercard to resolve claims over swipe fees. The agreement addresses long-standing disputes with merchants over the costs of card transactions.

The settlement resolves allegations that Visa and Mastercard imposed excessive fees on merchants for processing card payments. Merchants have argued that these fees, known as swipe fees or interchange fees, inflated costs and were anti-competitive.

The approval marks a significant development in the legal battle between the payment networks and merchants. The case has drawn scrutiny over the dominance of Visa and Mastercard in the payments industry.

Key Details of the Settlement

The settlement is expected to impact how swipe fees are structured and potentially lower costs for merchants in the future. It also underscores the ongoing regulatory and legal challenges facing major payment networks.