Thredd, the AI-first issuer processing platform, today announced it has joined the Visa Agentic Ready programme, enabling issuers across Europe to participate in agent-initiated payments without rebuilding their payments infrastructure. Consumer payments platform Zilch will be among the first issuers on the platform to enable agent-initiated payments for its cardholders.As a processor and enabler, Thredd sits at the trust layer of the payments ecosystem. By joining the programme, Thredd is ready to support Visa and its clients as the market moves into agentic commerce.Agentic commerce introduces a new type of payment initiator: An AI agent acting on a cardholder's behalf. The core payments principles do not change. Cardholder permission, issuer approval, authentication and fraud monitoring all still apply. What changes is how trust is established and enforced at the point an agent transacts.Taking a Zilch customer as an example, a cardholder might ask an AI agent to find a product within a set budget. The agent returns a recommendation, and with a single confirmation the cardholder instructs it to complete the purchase using their Zilch card. A Visa Payment Passkey confirms the cardholder's intent through biometric authentication, and the agent initiates the purchase with the merchant on the cardholder's behalf.“Agentic commerce represents a fundamental shift in how payments will work, and getting the infrastructure right from the outset is critical,” said Philip Belamant, CEO at Zilch. “By partnering with Thredd and joining Visa’s Agentic Ready programme, we’re ensuring that as AI agents become a natural part of how our customers shop and spend, the trust, security and control that defines the Zilch experience remains intact. Ultimately, this is about giving customers more control over how they spend, not less, and that sits at the heart of everything Zilch is building."Agent network readiness, built on existing infrastructureThredd's approach extends capabilities issuers already rely on, rather than asking them to start from scratch. The foundation for day-one network enablement is in place today:Tokenisation: Scheme tokenisation through Visa Token Service (VTS), so an agent only ever sees a token, never the underlying credentialDevice binding: Linking tokens to trusted devicesVisa Payment passkeys: Secure biometric authentication, allowing a cardholder to authorise a transaction completed on their behalfBuilding on this foundation, Thredd is developing agent-specific capabilities that recognise how agentic transactions differ from human ones:Agent tokenisation: Specialised tokens scoped to agents, with the permissions and controls an agent transaction requiresAgent fraud monitoring: Transaction rules built for agent behaviour, addressing patterns that traditional models were not designed to catch, such as execution drift and abnormal velocityThis builds directly on Thredd's existing tokenisation capability and its fraud transaction monitoring solution, both already operating at scale across the platform.NoYesPayments15 Jul, 2026