Visa Teams With Stripe on Agent Payments

Visa is supporting Stripe and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) by enabling card-based payments for trusted autonomous agent payments.

The company is extending MPP to support card-based payments on its global network and enabling the protocol on the Visa Acceptance Platform, it said in a Wednesday (March 18) press release.

Visa, which is a design partner on MPP, is releasing a card-based MPP spec that allows merchants, payment service providers and acquirers to participate in card payment flows within MPP; a software development kit (SDK) that implements the spec and helps developers build card-based transactions for MPPs and merchants the ability to accept cards via MPP; and access to Visa Intelligent Commerce and the Trusted Agent Protocol, which make card-based machine payments secure and trustworthy, according to the release.

“We’re entering a moment where agents can make decisions, move resources and pay for services on their own. But for these kinds of payments to scale, security isn’t optional, it has to be built into every layer — from authentication and data privacy to fraud prevention,” Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth products and strategic partnerships at Visa, said in the release. “By extending Visa’s network, we’re bringing trust and resilience into these new forms of commerce so that machine-based payments can be secure, open, programmable and built on shared standards.”

Stripe and Tempo introduced MPP Wednesday, saying this open standard for machine payments provides a standard way for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically and enables machine payments to work across services and payment rails. MPP currently works with stablecoins, cards and other supported payment methods.

“MPP runs on Tempo today, but the protocol itself is designed to be rail-agnostic and extensible,” Tempo said Wednesday when announcing MPP. “For example, our design partner Visa has already extended MPP to support card-based payments on their network.”

Visa’s Birwadker told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in December that Visa aims to make agentic commerce an extension of behaviors consumers already trust.

“It connects really well to checkout,” Birwadker said. Over time, payments could become “the next level of one-click checkout, perhaps even without a button.”

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.