AI Agents Go Shopping: Worldline, ING, Visa Unveil Europe's New Payment Future

PARIS-LA DÉFENSE & AMSTERDAM – July 02, 2026 – The landscape of digital commerce is undergoing a fundamental transformation, moving beyond clicks and carts into an era of autonomous, intelligent purchasing. In a groundbreaking development for Europe, payment services leader Worldline, global financial institution ING, and payments technology giant Visa have announced the successful completion of a live, end-to-end agentic payment transaction. This milestone, executed in Germany, demonstrates for the first time how AI-powered agents can conduct purchases securely on behalf of consumers, operating entirely within the existing robust regulatory and security frameworks.

The demonstration showcased a seamless flow: a consumer set predefined conditions for a purchase, including the item and price range. An AI agent, acting on these instructions, identified a suitable product. The consumer then authenticated their purchase intent and confirmed the final transaction using Visa Payment Passkey, a technology leveraging on-device biometrics. The payment was subsequently authorized by ING and processed from start to finish across Worldline’s secure infrastructure, proving that the age of AI-driven commerce is not a distant concept, but a present-day reality.

The Dawn of Autonomous Commerce

This successful pilot ushers in the era of 'agentic commerce,' a model where AI agents act as autonomous proxies for consumers, handling the entire shopping journey from product discovery to final payment. Unlike current e-commerce, which requires manual navigation and checkout, agentic commerce delegates these tasks to an AI that operates within the user’s explicit parameters. This shift promises unprecedented convenience, empowering consumers to automate routine purchases and complex shopping missions alike.

The market potential is staggering. Industry analysts at McKinsey project that AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030. Further research from Juniper forecasts that the number of agentic commerce users will surge from approximately 300 million in 2026 to 1.3 billion by 2031, with associated spending potentially reaching $1.5 trillion. This collaboration places European innovators at the heart of this burgeoning ecosystem.

“As agentic payments emerge, the priority is to build trust into a new way of buying and paying,” says Madalena Cascais Tomé, Member of the Executive Committee at Worldline. “With this new use case, together with ING, Worldline is further advancing the maturity of the agentic payments ecosystem in Europe, demonstrating how frontier payment journeys can take shape across geographies, use cases and customer experiences. At Worldline, we connect and orchestrate the participants of the payment value chain – issuers, acquirers, merchants, schemes – to enable these new models at scale, while building the trust, security and reliability needed for broader adoption.”

Securing the AI Revolution in Payments

A primary barrier to the adoption of autonomous financial technologies has been ensuring ironclad security and regulatory compliance. This is where the Worldline, ING, and Visa collaboration marks its most significant achievement. The transaction was designed to function seamlessly within Europe's existing Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and its stringent Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements.

The key to this compliance is the integration of Visa Payment Passkey. Instead of relying on vulnerable passwords or cumbersome one-time codes, this technology uses the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) standard to enable authentication via the consumer’s own device biometrics, such as a fingerprint or facial scan. This method not only provides a frictionless user experience but also ensures that the actual human consumer is in full control, explicitly authorizing the AI agent’s actions. The biometric data never leaves the user's personal device, preserving privacy while providing a robust verification layer.

For merchants, this development is transformative. It proves that embracing AI-initiated commerce does not require a trade-off on security or a complete overhaul of existing payment systems. Because the transaction is authenticated through established, trusted methods and authorized by a financial institution like ING, merchants can accept agent-initiated orders with the same level of confidence as a conventional online purchase. “Agentic AI has the potential to reshape digital commerce, and this milestone shows how that future can begin to take shape in Europe,” notes Mathieu Altwegg, Head of Product & Solutions at Visa Europe. “Through Visa Intelligent Commerce, we are helping bring trusted payment credentials, consumer control and programmability into emerging agentic commerce use cases.”

Building a Trusted Ecosystem for European Leadership

This initiative is more than a technical proof of concept; it is a strategic move to establish European leadership in the next generation of digital payments. The collaboration brings together three critical pillars of the payment ecosystem: Worldline as the payment processing and infrastructure backbone, ING as the trusted issuing bank retaining authorization control, and Visa as the global network providing the secure authentication technology. By joining Visa’s Agentic Ready Programme, both Worldline and ING have signaled their long-term commitment to pioneering this space.

“ING is committed to delivering convenient and secure experiences for our customers and their trusted agents,” said Hans Overeem, Head of Payments at ING Netherlands. “This milestone demonstrates that agented payments can be both user-friendly and auditable, with biometrics and delayed capture enabling flexible, safe purchasing.”

This cooperative approach stands in contrast to the fragmented development seen in other areas of AI, ensuring that a standardized, interoperable, and secure framework is built from the ground up. While major technology firms are developing their own protocols, this collaboration grounds agentic commerce in the existing, highly regulated financial system, fostering a greater degree of trust and reliability. It establishes a clear and verifiable record of what was authorized, by whom, and under what conditions, giving all parties confidence in the transaction's integrity.

Overcoming Hurdles for Mainstream Adoption

Despite the immense potential, the path to widespread adoption of agentic commerce is not without challenges. Consumer trust remains a significant hurdle; recent studies show that while people are comfortable with AI flagging fraud, they are far more hesitant to allow it to make financial decisions autonomously. Concerns about privacy, data security, and the potential for errors are paramount.

On the merchant side, challenges include the technical complexity of making product catalogs machine-readable and the need to adapt fraud detection systems to differentiate between legitimate AI agents and malicious bots. The pilot directly addresses these concerns by demonstrating a model where consumer control is paramount and security is built upon existing, trusted standards. By leveraging SCA-compliant biometric authentication, it provides a powerful answer to the question of trust. It shows consumers that they hold the ultimate authority, and it assures merchants that they are protected by the same robust security measures they rely on today.

This successful test serves as a foundational block, demonstrating that the architecture for a trusted, AI-driven commercial future is not just a concept, but a present-day reality.