Thredd, an issuer processing platform, has joined the Visa Agentic Ready programme, enabling issuers across Europe to support agent-initiated payments without rebuilding their existing payments infrastructure. Consumer payments platform Zilch will be among the first issuers on Thredd's platform to enable agent-initiated payments for its cardholders.
What agentic commerce changes for payments
Agentic commerce introduces a new type of payment initiator: an AI agent acting on behalf of a cardholder. According to Thredd, core payment principles such as cardholder permission, issuer approval, authentication, and fraud monitoring continue to apply, but the way trust is established and enforced at the point of transaction changes when an agent is involved.
As an example, Thredd described a scenario in which a Zilch customer asks an AI agent to find a product within a set budget. The agent returns a recommendation, and following a single confirmation from the cardholder, a Visa Payment Passkey confirms the cardholder's intent through biometric authentication before the agent completes the purchase with the merchant on the cardholder's behalf.
Building on existing infrastructure
According to Thredd, its approach to agent network readiness extends capabilities issuers already use, rather than requiring new infrastructure. This includes scheme tokenisation through the Visa Token Service, which ensures an agent only accesses a token rather than the underlying card credential, device binding to link tokens to trusted devices, and Visa Payment Passkeys for biometric authentication of cardholder-authorised transactions.
Building on this foundation, Thredd is developing agent-specific capabilities, including agent tokenisation, which involves specialised tokens scoped to the specific permissions required for an agent-initiated transaction, and agent fraud monitoring, which applies transaction rules designed to address patterns specific to agent behaviour, such as execution drift and abnormal transaction velocity. These capabilities build on Thredd's existing tokenisation and fraud monitoring systems, which are already used across its platform.
Company commentary
A company official at Zilch said agentic commerce represents a shift in how payments will operate, and that partnering with Thredd and joining Visa's Agentic Ready programme is intended to maintain existing standards of trust, security, and customer control as AI agents become part of how customers shop and spend. The official said the goal is to give customers more control over their spending, rather than less.
A company official at Thredd said major shifts in payments typically require a trusted infrastructure layer capable of managing increased ecosystem complexity, and that issuers need a way to adopt agentic commerce without compromising security, customer control, or speed to market. The official said Thredd's participation in the Visa Agentic Ready programme is intended to help issuers across Europe become agent-ready using infrastructure they already rely on.
Implications for issuers across Europe
By joining the programme, Thredd is positioning itself as an infrastructure layer that allows issuers to adopt agent-initiated payments without significant infrastructure changes. As agentic commerce develops as a payment category, the availability of tokenisation, biometric authentication, and agent-specific fraud monitoring tools may become increasingly relevant for issuers preparing to support AI agents as a new participant in the payments process.
