With AI Making Payments Invisible, Trust Becomes the New Currency: Visa’s Suresh Sethi

• Autonomous Financial Proxies: AI agents will increasingly discover products, compare merchant offerings, build shopping baskets, and initiate transactions on behalf of consumers without manual checkout interventions.
• Ambient & Invisible Payments: Transaction settlement is transitioning into a background utility layer, allowing consumers to focus on outcomes rather than the manual mechanics of payment authorization.
• Machine-to-Machine Velocity: Core banking systems and payment switches are preparing for high-frequency, automated micro-settlements initiated between software agents and merchant protocols.

The Evolution of Authentication: Beyond Passwords and OTPs

With payments becoming invisible, static credentials are no longer sufficient to secure transactions:

• Intent Verification Architecture: The core security challenge shifts from verifying who the customer is to verifying what the customer intended their AI agent to execute.
• Secured-by-Design Infrastructure: Frameworks such as the Visa Payment Passkey are being deployed across India to replace vulnerable SMS-based OTPs with biometric, device-bound cryptographic tokens that ensure seamless, tamper-proof execution.
• Dynamic Spending Mandates: Establishing strict programmatic guardrails, spending caps, and algorithmic bounds to prevent unauthorized or anomalous AI agent actions.