Visa与OpenAI合作及万事达卡机器代理支付：信用卡正式进入代理时代

Visa-OpenAI Partnership, Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines:Cards firmly enter the agentic era Visa today announced a partnership with OpenAI (link) to essentially enable agenticcommerce, conversational agentic workflows and developer experiences through VisaIntelligent Commerce (including Visa agent tokens) and services. Visa and OpenAI are solvingfor two key focus areas 1) seamless agentic commerce experiences, 2) exploring futureagentic economy use cases including developer-focused autonomous agent experiencespowered by Codex, and conversational automated workflows. For anyone who has doubtedVisa’s (and cards’) positioning in agentic commerce and machine-to-machine payments - webelieve this partnership is a strong proof point that cards have firmly entered the agentic eraof commerce. To be clear, we believe this is a 5yr opportunity (not a 2yr one) but it is critical tothe multiple. Harshita Rawat, CFA+1 917 344 8485harshita.rawat@bernsteinsg.com Viola Chen+1 917 344 8614viola.chen@bernsteinsg.com Simran Ratani+1 917 344 8329simran.ratani@bernsteinsg.com V (and MA) are networks of trust(and often misunderstood as backend money movementwhich settlement layers handle).Agents will (eventually) bring a paradigm shift in howwe engage in commerce experiences, and simultaneously bring new economicmodels/payments(e.g., automated agent workflows).A massive trust infrastructurewill be required to facilitate these commerce experiences- and cards are extremelywell positioned. OpenAI’s comment in the release was quite noteworthy:“Commerce is going to happenin many more places and in many more ways than it does today, and agents will play anincreasingly important role in helping people complete tasks that involve money—frompurchases and payments to more complex transactions,”. “By integrating with Visa IntelligentCommerce, we're building the infrastructure for secure, transparent, and user-controlledagentic transactions, helping people do more with AI agents while maintaining confidencethat payments are being handled securely.” The announcements todaynot only provide a big stamp of approval for agentic cardtokens but also a proof point that value-added services’ (VAS) growth opportunitywill be enhanced with agentic(e.g., around authentication tokenization, risk, fraud).Forexample, Visa announced new services today — Agent Score(allows merchants toevaluate their websites for agentic commerce readiness),Agentic Directory(whether themerchant or agents are verified), and Large Transaction Model (for fraud detection). Concurrently, with this announcement, Visa also announced enhancements to itstokens —bringing more data (e.g., on transaction type, where token is being used and whois making the payment), assurance (using token history to generate a signal of trust behindeach transaction) and context — to enable agent-initiated transactions. Note that all thesecreate monetization opportunities in the future. It is likely that OpenAI announces a partnership around Mastercard AgentPay foragentic commerce,but unclear if it will include the future enterprise machine paymentuse-case.Separately, we note that Mastercard also introduced Agent Pay forMachines (AP4M) today, a new credentialed multi-rail service to enable permissionedmachine payments. Partners include Adyen, Ant, Checkout, Coinbase, Lovable, Stripe, etc. Taking a step back, Agentic Commerce is often discussed as a potential risk forVisa/Mastercard. It’s very much the opposite(more digitization, transactions, & VAS). In the agentic world (where trust will be scarce), cards (with an array of services, 7B+credentials, 100m+ merchants) will quite likely be the payment method of choice. Cardscan also easily adjust their commercial models to accommodate autonomous agenttransactions (including very small ticket transactions for compute, tokens, images). V/MAhave done this historically to make transit and vending machine small-ticket transactionsaddressable. There is then the optionality with B2B where agentic commerce has thestrongest product market fit. We wonder if the news including the ones from today help the narrative around thenetworks transition from an ‘AI trade funding source trade’ to ‘AI winners’. We alsonote that several key overhangs are now somewhat behind us including CCCA (likelihoodquite low vs. beginning of the year), the MDL settlement and Illinois card fee lawsuit. Also,good to remember that networks are excellent inflation hedges (and get paid on bps on gasspend). INVESTMENT IMPLICATIONS We rate V, MA, TOST, Adyen, XYZ OP. We rate FISV, FIS, GPN, KLAR and PYPL MP. PLEASE SEE LINKS TO OUR PREVIOUS RELATED NOTES: •Payments: Visa/Mastercard merchant settlement preliminary approval; A closure, finally?(June 2026)•The Long View: Payments - Does Cash Digitization Runway Still Exist?(June 2026)•Weekend Tech Byte: The 'cost' of cards — the often misleading comparisons; our perspectives in key charts (June 2026)•Visa: Reflections on our Fireside Ch