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- Banco Santander and Visa completed Latin America’s first end-to-end agentic commerce pilot across five markets — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay — with AI agents autonomously purchasing books and chocolates on behalf of customers.
- The pilot ran on Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC), which uses agent-specific payment tokens, cryptographic signatures, and passkey authentication to bind credentials to specific AI agents.
- Over 70% of Latin American consumers have already integrated AI into their shopping journeys, according to Visa data cited in the announcement.
- Visa predicts millions of consumers will use AI agents to complete purchases by the 2026 holiday season, with over 100 partners building within the VIC ecosystem globally.
What Happened
Banco Santander and Visa announced on March 12, 2026, the successful completion of controlled pilot agentic commerce transactions across five Latin American markets, marking the region’s first end-to-end payments powered by AI agents. The transactions were not chatbot-assisted purchases — autonomous AI agents initiated and completed real purchases without human intervention at the point of sale.
In Brazil, an AI agent purchased chocolates. In Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay, the agents bought books. Each transaction ran through Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC), the infrastructure layer Visa built specifically for agent-initiated payments.
Why It Matters
The pilot is the first publicly documented case of a major bank allowing AI agents to execute real financial transactions autonomously in a controlled environment across multiple countries. Until now, agentic commerce has been largely theoretical — discussed at fintech conferences and prototyped in sandboxes but not tested with live payment rails.
Matías Sánchez, global head of Cards and Digital Solutions at Banco Santander, said: “This is a major step toward making AI-assisted shopping a practical reality. By testing real transactions, we demonstrated how these technologies act as enablers of secure, interoperable agentic commerce that maintains strong consumer protections and issuer controls.”
The timing aligns with broader industry movement. Visa introduced its Trusted Agent Protocol in October 2025 alongside more than 10 partners, establishing an open framework for distinguishing legitimate AI agents from malicious bots during checkout.
Technical Details
Visa Intelligent Commerce uses three core security mechanisms for agent-initiated transactions. First, agent-specific pass-through payment tokens bind credentials to individual AI agents, ensuring payments can only be initiated by the right agent, for the right purpose, at the right moment. Second, cryptographic signatures through the Trusted Agent Protocol allow merchants to verify that an agent is legitimate rather than a bot. Third, passkey-based authentication performs step-up verification of the cardholder before setting up the credentials that authorize payment instructions.
The system also collects commerce signals — the user’s original instruction and details of each authorized purchase — enabling rapid dispute resolution. New controls validate that authorization requests received by VisaNet match the original payment instruction from the consumer, adding an additional verification layer between the agent’s action and the final charge.
Over 30 partners are actively building within the VIC sandbox, and more than 20 agents and agent enablers are integrating directly with the platform globally.
Who’s Affected
For banks and card issuers, the pilot establishes a working template for how to participate in agentic commerce without ceding control over authorization and fraud prevention. Catalina Tobar, head of Growth Products and Partnerships for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean, stated: “The pilot with Santander marks a defining moment for commerce in Latin America. Through Visa Intelligent Commerce, we’re laying the foundation for AI-driven transactions that are secure, seamless and built for scale.”
Merchants accepting Visa face a near-term shift: distinguishing between human shoppers and AI agents at checkout will require adopting the Trusted Agent Protocol or similar verification layers. Consumers across the region are already primed — over 70% of Latin American consumers have integrated AI into their shopping journeys according to data cited in the announcement.
What’s Next
Visa has stated that it expects millions of consumers to use AI agents for purchases by the 2026 holiday season. Pilot programs in Asia Pacific and Europe are anticipated to begin in 2026, following the Latin American proof of concept. The company is working with more than 100 partners across the commerce ecosystem to scale VIC infrastructure.
One limitation worth noting: the pilot involved low-value, low-risk purchases (books and chocolates). Whether the same security framework holds for higher-value transactions, recurring subscriptions, or purchases requiring real-time price negotiation remains untested. Santander and Visa have not disclosed a timeline for expanding the pilot beyond controlled transactions.
