The payments landscape is evolving faster than ever. As we enter an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and automation, trust has never mattered more. New technologies are transforming how people pay and get paid, but confidence, security and resilience remain the foundations that make commerce possible.
Over the past two decades, Visa has played a pivotal role in enabling the digital marketplace: first with ecommerce and then mobile commerce across Europe. Now, we’re preparing for the next wave: agentic commerce. This shift is expected to see AI-powered agents making purchases, managing subscriptions, and even negotiating on behalf of users. It’s an exciting frontier, but one that also introduces new complexities and vulnerabilities.
In parallel with this evolving payment landscape, fraud continues to adapt. Scams are becoming more sophisticated, more personalised and harder to detect, often exploiting trust and familiarity to deceive consumers and businesses alike. Deepfake voices, synthetic identities, and hyper-personalised scam messages are now part of the fraudster’s toolkit.
As fraudsters adopt new technologies and techniques, the challenge of protecting payments grows more complex, reinforcing the need for payment systems that are resilient by design and able to adapt as risks change.
For example, last year we shared AI-generated images on social media, including that of a ‘feathered lamb’, to highlight how scammers use AI to identify potential victims. Our research showed that, across Europe, people who mistake AI-generated content for real content are almost five times more likely to fall victim to a scam, while those who share content without verifying it are almost twice as likely to be scammed¹.
And while consumer education is vital, the wider ecosystem must respond too. Visa has long pioneered the use of AI in fraud prevention, and we continue to invest to make sure we stay several steps ahead. We fight the fraudsters’ AI with our own AI capabilities, such as Featurespace, while the Visa Scam Disruption unit works to uncover and take down global scam networks.
We have strengthened our fraud prevention capabilities with advanced behavioural analytics, biometric verification, and real-time risk scoring. These tools combine technology with human expertise, helping us to detect subtle patterns that indicate fraud, even when the transaction itself appears legitimate.
And ultimately, that’s how trust is built. The future of commerce must have trust at its core – it is the currency we trade in. We will continue to be a trusted network, supporting the convergence of open data and AI. With the scale at which digital commerce now operates, credibility doesn’t happen by accident. It must be deliberately built into the infrastructure that underpins every transaction. At Visa, security is not an add‑on or a single point of defence; it is embedded across the entire payment lifecycle.
Another element of trust is resilience. Visa’s resilient and reliable network is a foundation for European economies, enabling people and businesses to thrive. Our track record of reliability and resilience meets some of the highest service standards of any industry. Innovation is at the core of our resilience strategy, ensuring we operate the latest technologies, capabilities, and processes to deliver our promise: you can trust the payment when it goes through Visa’s network – in fact, you do not even have to think about it, because it just works, 99.999% of the time².
As commerce becomes more automated, this approach must extend beyond individual transactions. Agentic commerce requires a broader trust framework, one that supports secure interactions before, during and after payment. Through initiatives such as Visa Intelligent Commerce and the Trusted Agent Protocol, we are working to support secure, transparent interactions between AI agents, merchants and financial institutions, while preserving visibility and control for consumers.
Control is critical. Even when agents act on their behalf, consumers must retain visibility and the ability to intervene when something doesn’t look right. Building trust in this new environment means ensuring innovation enhances confidence rather than undermining it.
We also recognise that trust is not something any one organisation can deliver alone. We’re working closely with regulators, partners, and consumers, both in Europe and across the globe, to build the infrastructure needed to ensure that as the ecosystem evolves, it does so with integrity and resilience at its core.
The future of payments will undoubtedly be shaped by AI and automation. But technology alone is not what makes commerce work successfully. Trust that is earned, maintained and reinforced every day is what allows innovation to scale. Our focus is on ensuring that as payments evolve, they continue to be supported by a trusted, resilient and reliable foundation.
This content was developed for a European audience and relates to Visa’s offerings in Europe
Sources
¹The research was conducted by Opinium, on behalf of Visa, between August and September 2025. This survey includes a nationally representative sample of 9,500 adults across 11 markets in Europe. The markets include UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Hungry, Slovakia, Czechia, Spain, Bulgaria.
²Visa Inc., 2025 Investor Day Transcript, p. 40.