Guardrails in place for AI-led commerce: Visa

SINGAPORE: Payments giant Visa is looking to launch agentic commerce pilots across the Asia-Pacific region as regulatory and ecosystem readiness advances by early next year. Agentic commerce refers to a new era where AI-powered agents shop and pay on behalf of users. The company’s Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC) programme incorporates features like tokenisation, authentication, payment instructions, and transaction signals. As far as India is concerned, VIC will be launched once regulatory approvals are in place. “If you take the combination of tokenisation and RBI’s new authentication circular, the enabling regulatory environment is right for agentic commerce. We will have discussions. I want to have my team go and demo it to RBI, and we want to make sure we do it in a responsible manner with all the due regulatory approvals in place,” Visa’s head of products and solutions (Asia-Pacific) T R Ramachandran said during the Singapore Fintech Festival here last week.“The pace of e-commerce and quick commerce, year-on-year growth in India has been staggering. The growth is no longer restricted to cities like Mumbai, Gurgaon, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad. Amazon tells us that they have 6,000 pin codes from which they get shopping orders, which is huge. The rapid growth of LLMs (large language models) will only accelerate online shopping. As far as agentic commerce is concerned, we are not letting somebody run amok without guardrails or without controls or without constraints,” he said.When it comes to detecting fraud, Ramachandran said that Visa has been securing the ecosystem with AI-driven risk services for banks and fintechs in India. It has implemented AI-led ‘visa advanced authorisation’ and ‘visa risk manager’ across most banking partners and fintechs, strengthening real-time fraud detection and ecosystem resilience.(The writer was in Singapore at the invitation of Visa)