Q: What role can issuers play as AI agents begin to manage payments autonomously? Issuers have an opportunity to become a critical enablement layer as automation increases. As AI‑driven systems are designed, they will rely on payment capabilities that deliver consistent authorisation performance, low latency, global acceptance, and enriched data. This places greater emphasis on programmable credentials, real‑time controls, scalable settlement, and strong API connectivity, capabilities that help issuers support automation while maintaining oversight and risk management. Visa supports this ecosystem by providing global reach, resilient infrastructure, and data‑driven controls that help issuers enable travel sellers to operate with confidence as payment flows become more automated. Q: How does agentic AI change customer experience, even when it’s operating behind the scenes? Even when travellers never see it, agentic AI can significantly improve the experience. Faster supplier settlement helps reduce disruption impact. Automated re‑issuance of credentials supports quicker rebooking. Smarter reconciliation reduces errors, delays, or disputes that can affect customers indirectly. On the front end, AI enables real‑time personalisation, dynamic offers, and seamless payments across devices. On the back end, it ensures those experiences are supported by reliable and secure payment flows. Visa’s work across tokenisation, virtual cards, and AI‑powered authorisation helps ensure that both sides of the journey, customer and supplier, remain efficient, trusted, and resilient.
AI is a double‑edged sword. While it improves efficiency and experience, it also enables more sophisticated fraud, from synthetic identities to AI‑driven social engineering and agent manipulation. The key is applying AI to security at scale. Visa’s fraud solutions analyse billions of transactions globally, using machine learning to assess hundreds of risk factors in milliseconds. This helps maximise approval rates for legitimate transactions while reducing fraud, particularly important for high‑value, cross‑border travel payments. Trust is foundational. AI only works when security, transparency, and accountability are built in from the start, and that’s an area where Visa brings decades of experience. Q: What makes Visa the right partner as travel companies take their next steps with AI? AI’s impact doesn’t depend on
algorithms alone; it depends on partnerships. Visa brings together global acceptance, trusted infrastructure, deep AI expertise, and transaction data. We’ve been applying AI to payments for over 30 years, from fraud prevention to authorisation optimisation. Today, that experience translates into solutions that are automation‑ready, data‑rich, and built for scale from tokenisation and virtual cards to real‑time risk scoring and settlement intelligence. Our goal is to empower issuers with the capabilities they need to support the travel ecosystem helping OTAs, airlines, hotels, and TMCs operate with greater confidence, insight, and control as AI adoption accelerates. Q: Looking ahead, what should travel leaders be doing now to prepare for agentic AI? The organisations that succeed will be those that modernise early. That means investing in structured data, reliable payment performance, strong APIs, and scalable controls, so AI agents can operate with speed, confidence, and oversight. Agentic AI has the potential to increase efficiency and transaction volumes over time, but humans will continue to govern strategy, risk, and relationships. That hybrid operating model requires payment systems that provide transparency, control, and reliability alongside automation. Visa remains committed to supporting this evolution, working with the travel ecosystem to help enable payments that are intelligent, efficient, secure, and ready to support automation at global scale.
TANIA PLATT
Q: Fraud is evolving just as fast as AI. How should the travel industry think about security in this new environment?
| 87
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker