[MPE 2026] Strategic talks: Visa on programmable payments and agentic commerce

At MPE 2026, The Paypers’ Mélisande Mual sat down with Mathieu Altwegg, Senior Vice President, Head of Product & Solutions, Europe at Visa to discuss the strategic shifts that will change merchant payments over the next 24 months. The conversation covered programmable payments, agentic commerce, the practical steps that merchants should be taking today, as well as the risks that may still be underestimated in the boardroom.

The shift to programmable payments

According to Mathieu Altwegg, the most transformative shift in the next 24 months is payment programmability. Rather than manually initiating each transaction, consumers will increasingly describe their desired outcomes and let systems execute on their behalf. The pace of the change frames this conversation, as over the last 12 months, GenAI platforms have become part of the daily life of up to 1.5 billion people, double from just six months ago. Enabling people to shop better is already the second-highest use case on these platforms.

While programmability is something we already do today – from setting up subscriptions, to scheduling monthly transfers between accounts – these are only the early forms. The shift underway is from consumers being users of finance to becoming programmers of their financial life.

What it means for merchants

For merchants, the impact shows up across several dimensions, including the shopping experience itself and the choices merchants enable around rails, payment options, and funding sources.

On experience, agents acting on behalf of consumers are finally arriving, and the timeline shared in the interview is shorter than many expect. Merchants will need to be ready to recognise these new participants in the transaction flow and interact with them, which immediately raises the question of trust.

On choice, the conversation touched on the role of stablecoins for merchants – not necessarily as a means of accepting payments, but as a tool to drive the business in specific ways. The interview gets into where that's most relevant.

Asked what merchants should start doing today, Visa offered three concrete steps. They span how card credentials are evolving, how checkout itself is changing, and how authentication is moving toward a new generation of solutions that connect to verifiable credentials and digital identity. Each opens up a different set of use cases for merchants, and each is unpacked in detail in the recording.

The boardroom view and the risks still underestimated

Merchants have become significantly more sophisticated over the past five years, and agentic readiness has moved into the boardroom. Visa referenced its recently introduced Agent ready programme, built to help issuers, acquirers, and merchants prepare their systems for this new transaction type.

On risk, two areas stood out in the conversation: the trade-offs that come with scale and complexity – as multiple agentic standards emerge – and the evolving shape of fraud in a world where the same GenAI tools driving innovation are equally available to bad actors. The interview goes into how Visa thinks merchants should be weighing both.

This is just a wrap up of the conversation. Listen to the full interview for the complete discussion.