ET Spotlight
India’s digital payments journey has emerged as “a showcase for the world” in building a deep, scalable, and reliable digital public infrastructure (DPI). The next decade of this global leadership, however, is likely to be pivoted around artificial intelligence as the technology is perfectly poised to not only make decisions but execute transactions on behalf of individuals and enterprises, eventually.
This scenario looks inevitable, and as we move closer to realising it, trust and security become more critical than ever. The trust factor will emerge as a two-faced challenge, where it is imperative that consumers as well as the merchants and payment systems trust the decisions and identity of the AI agent.
Visa, the global payments gateway connecting consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and governments, sees its role as becoming the essential trust layer for the digital payments system in India. The company is focused on powering the trust infrastructure with the ineluctable emergence of agentic commerce.
“Visa is a company which has built digital payment infrastructure at global scale. A lot of foundational principles of a DPI are enshrined in what Visa does,” Suresh Sethi, Group Country Manager, India and South Asia at Visa, told The Economic Times.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, organised between September 8 and 11, with the core theme of “Agentic AI | Tokenisation | Quantum. Trusted, Connected, Global Systems for Inclusive Finance.”
Sethi elaborated and said that it was not just about money movement, where Visa enables to pay and get paid, adding that, “What is equally important is how do we build the trust in the entire money movement.”
Terming Visa as the “trust factor” in the system, Sethi added that when it is about Visa, the consumer has the trust that the money will go through. “For any DPI, trust is something you cannot bolt on.”
Visa sees this as an opportunity to not just enable the money movement, but also build that trust layer in the DPI economy of this digital nation.
AI as a decision maker and the trust question:
Not long ago, technology was helping us search for products. As we move deep into the AI era, there is a significant shift where the technology is helping us make decisions. People are increasingly relying on AI to help them make decisions, including when shopping or planning to travel.
“We are actually asking AI to help us create an itinerary for our travel, including destinations, locations, and other choices,” Sethi told The Economic Times, “So, it (AI) is playing a strong role in helping us make purchase decisions.”
The assumption that AI is going to execute transactions for us in the near future is no longer a fallacy. For that to happen, however, the platform where the transaction is taking place should be able to recognise the agent; a matter of trust, one must say.
“The site has to get configured in a way where it can support an agent-led journey,” Sethi maintained, “And again, it comes down to the trust factor. Your AI agent should not hallucinate if you are trusting it with your instructions.”
Essentially, with the rise of AI in payment systems, a new set of challenges is stacked around identity, security and trust, given the fact that traditional commerce websites have largely been designed for human interaction, whereas for agentic commerce we will need a distinct set of requirements/support.
Visa’s “trust” plan:
India has been relentless in building the world’s most sophisticated digital payments ecosystem. The infrastructure supporting this sector is robust and already scaled to a level that is unprecedented.
Building further on this infrastructure at the core, Visa is developing Visa Intelligent Commerce, which will enable a trust-based interaction between websites and AI agents.
Visa Intelligent Commerce will enable:
- Trusted agent identification
- Agent certification
- Agent-led commerce journeys
- Making commerce sites discoverable by AI agents
- Helping consumers use more trusted agents
“It (Visa Intelligent Commerce) is all about building trusted agent identification, agent certification, and looking at the entire journey end-to-end, by helping commerce sites become better to be discovered by agents, and likewise help consumers with agents who are more trusted,” Sethi explained.
Another significant thing that Visa is building is the “Visa Payment Pass Keys”. It is the second-factor authentication that the RBI has introduced in a regulation after the One-Time Password was mandated and extensively used.
“We launched it a couple of months ago. Think about an experience where you look at your phone and the transaction gets authorised, just as the phone unlocks when you look at it,” Sethi explained, adding that these initiatives will become the building blocks to agentic e-commerce.
Despite these “building blocks,” the industry leaders understand that there needs to be another foundational safety layer, even after the consumers start trusting the ‘agents’. A thought process that has led to tokenisation of payments.
Tokenisation is when payment information is shared with AI agents in a tokenised form, which helps hide credentials and prevent sensitive information from being exposed. Sethi says India is the “tokenisation capital of the world”.
“At Visa, we actually use tokenisation, and you can actually use it. It is the foundation of agent e-commerce,” he said.
Real-time Cybersecurity:
In this scenario, where commerce will be increasingly AI-driven, cybersecurity becomes uncompromisable. It has to evolve to keep pace with the ecosystem, as businesses and fraudsters will invest in sophisticated technology; “it is machines fighting machines, a Terminator sort of an experience.”
“The implication is that Cyber resilience can no longer be based solely on periodic detection and remediation. It has to be real-time online at machine speed,” he asserted.
Visa has been experimenting with agentic approaches to cybersecurity, including through its participation in Project Glasswing, where companies tested the ability of advanced AI models to identify interconnected vulnerabilities.
Bridging India’s digital divide:
The significant opportunity the rise of AI has brought along is inclusion, rather than only automation. AI is going to allow people to communicate with machines in natural ways, even using their traditional dialects, as the technology gets more and more sophisticated. The need to learn complex digital interfaces will cease to exist.
“The exciting part is that you are now harnessing technology for being able to do what you wanted to do, rather than learning,” he said, adding, “This could be particularly significant for India’s historically assisted economy. And I think that is where the digital divide is getting bridged over, because India was a huge assisted economy, and it still is today,”
The arc now is shaped to look ahead of just a digital payments ecosystem, towards another one where AI agents, tokenisation, biometric authentication and interoperable digital infrastructure work together. The journey will, however, demand trust to remain embedded in the architecture by design
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