Visa has launched its Agentic Ready programme across Asia Pacific, including Malaysia, marking the payment network’s first structured initiative to prepare issuers for the era of agentic commerce. The programme involves three Malaysia-based financial institutions (Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad, CIMB Bank Berhad, and Maybank) and forms part of a broader rollout spanning ten markets across the region.
In its first phase, Visa Agentic Ready focuses on issuer readiness, providing a structured pathway for issuers to test, validate, and understand agent-initiated transactions in a controlled, production-grade environment. The programme enables issuers to experience how AI agents initiate and complete transactions on behalf of consumers, while maintaining the trust, controls, and consumer protections that underpin the Visa network. It is powered by Visa’s foundational network capabilities, combining tokenisation, identity verification, risk management, and transaction controls.
Building ecosystem readiness across Asia Pacific
The Asia Pacific launch closely follows the programme’s rollout in Europe and builds on early global traction with partners. Beyond Malaysia, Visa Agentic Ready is now live in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Additional partners are expected to join as the programme expands its scope to include merchants and ecosystem enablers.
Visa Agentic Ready sits within Visa Intelligent Commerce, the company’s portfolio of initiatives focused on enabling trusted, AI-driven commerce at scale. As the shopping journey becomes increasingly automated, the programme aims to ensure that AI agents can act on a consumer’s behalf securely and in accordance with their preferences, without compromising security or customer control. Visa is also working globally with AI platforms, merchants, and technology partners to enable trusted agent-initiated payments across the broader ecosystem.
A company official at Visa Malaysia noted that as commerce becomes increasingly automated, trust, security, and consumer control become more important, and that the programme offers issuers a practical way to better understand how agent-initiated payments could work on the Visa network before these experiences scale. Officials at all three participating Malaysian banks similarly emphasised the importance of testing agent-initiated transaction flows within a structured and trusted environment. Representatives from Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad observed that preparing for agentic payments cannot be done in isolation, while those from CIMB Bank Berhad pointed to AI’s role in reshaping consumer behaviours and business models. Maybank’s representatives highlighted the need to explore new payment models in a controlled way that preserves consumer trust.
The controlled testing environment validates how agent-initiated payments operate in real-world conditions, allowing issuers to build confidence ahead of broader commercial deployment. The initiative reflects Visa’s wider strategic direction towards programmable, intelligent commerce, where network credentials and controls enable payments to respond to consumer intent and context in an automated environment.
