CaixaBank in Spain has successfully completed a real-world payment initiated by an AI agent acting on behalf of a human cardholder. The transaction used the Intelligent Commerce framework and Agentic Ready programme developed by project partner Visa. The bank said the pilot used real card data on standard merchant systems secured by existing tokenisation, ID verification, and fraud monitoring systems from Visa, together proving “the viability of payments initiated by AI agents within the current infrastructure”.
Visa launched its Agentic Ready programme in Europe in March this year to help financial institutions test and validate agent-initiated transactions. Further afield, Visa has already tested agentic commerce with the likes of DBS and Santander.
Meanwhile, competing network Mastercard claims to have completed the first agentic payment transaction in France last week, working in partnership with Crédit Agricole and Worldline.
CaixaBank, which is headquartered in Valencia and serves around 12 million cardholders, is currently investing €5 billion through its 2025 to 2027 Cosmos technology strategy, which focuses on integrating generative AI to automate internal workflows and transaction processing.
Late last year, the banking group also established its Artificial Intelligence Office for project compliance and governance, and has begun rolling out conversational AI agents across digital channels to handle digital customer onboarding for approximately 40 retail products.
