Thredd Joins The Visa Agentic Ready Programme, Bringing Agent Network Readiness To Issuers Across Europe, Starting With Zilch
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.
