Thredd platform will support agent-initiated payments for issuers

Zilch will be among the first issuers on Thredd’s platform in Europe to enable agent-initiated payments for cardholders through Visa’s Agentic Ready programme.

According to Thredd, issuers across Europe can join agent-initiated payments without rebuilding their existing payments infrastructure.

In agentic commerce, an AI agent acts on a cardholder’s behalf when it starts a payment.

However, the core rules do not change: cardholder permission, issuer approval, authentication and fraud monitoring still apply.

What changes is how trust is established and enforced at the point where an agent completes a transaction.

Thredd said it sits at the trust layer of the payments ecosystem as a processor and enabler.

By joining the Visa Agentic Ready programme, Thredd is preparing to support Visa and its clients as the market moves into agentic commerce.

A Zilch customer example in the briefing shows the flow in simple steps.

First, a cardholder asks an AI agent to find a product within a set budget.

Next, the agent returns a recommendation, and the cardholder gives a single confirmation to use a Zilch card.

Then a Visa Payment Passkey confirms the cardholder’s intent through biometric authentication.

After that biometric check, the agent initiates the purchase with the merchant on the cardholder’s behalf.

Visa Token Service controls

Thredd said its day-one network enablement uses infrastructure that issuers already rely on rather than asking them to start from scratch.

That foundation includes scheme tokenisation through Visa Token Service, also called VTS.

Under that setup, an agent sees only a token and never the underlying card credential.

Device binding links those tokens to trusted devices used by the cardholder.

Visa Payment Passkeys add secure biometric authentication so a cardholder can authorise a transaction completed on their behalf.

Meanwhile, Thredd is developing agent-specific controls for transactions that differ from human-initiated payments.

One tool is agent tokenisation, which uses specialised tokens scoped to agents with defined permissions and controls.

Another tool is agent fraud monitoring, with transaction rules built for agent behaviour.

Thredd said those rules are designed to catch patterns that traditional models were not built to detect, including execution drift and abnormal velocity.

Philip Belamant, chief executive of Zilch, said: “Agentic commerce represents a fundamental shift in how payments will work, and getting the infrastructure right from the outset is critical.”

Belamant said Zilch’s partnership with Thredd and Visa is intended to keep trust, security and control in place as AI agents become part of how customers shop and spend.

He added that the model is meant to give customers more control over how they spend, using the same protections that already apply to card payments.