Visa pilots AI agents paying invoices as its supplier checks wait for 2027

On 20 October in Las Vegas, Visa, BILL and Billtrust said they had launched what they call the first live pilot in which AI agents initiate and complete approved buyer invoice payments end to end through supplier portals. A day later, Visa folded the pilot into a wider commercial payments announcement that added a supplier-spend analytics tool, SESA 2.0, and a new suite called Visa Commercial Fraud Solutions.

The pilot automates one step. According to the companies, the final step of paying a supplier “often requires an employee to manually log into a supplier portal and submit payment information”. In the pilot, BILL’s agent pays with a tokenized card credential instead of a shared portal login, and Billtrust uses Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol to recognize and authenticate the agent. The companies say that check can satisfy the protections that CAPTCHA and other bot blocks used to provide, without a separate agent login.

“Businesses should not have to choose between automation and control when making payments,” said Mark Nelsen, Visa’s head of product for commercial and money movement solutions.

The agent pilot is live and processing end-to-end transactions now. Two of the three fraud tools Visa announced alongside it, supplier validation and virtual-card user authentication, are themselves in pilot and will not be generally available until 2027. Visa describes the suite as support for “more trusted, automated payment experiences”. The releases do not say whether the agent pilot will use it, and agents are completing payments before most of the suite is on general release.

What the agent is allowed to do

The agent does not decide what to pay. A buyer approves the invoice in BILL first, and the agent carries out that instruction at the supplier’s portal. On the other side, Billtrust applies the supplier’s own acceptance policy before the payment is taken. Visa says this keeps visibility of who is acting, what the agent is permitted to do and which transactions were approved.

BILL says nearly 500,000 businesses use it and that its platform processes about 1% of US GDP each year. Billtrust says its network covers more than 20 million buyers and $1tn (£746bn) a year in trade credit. The pilot runs only between participating BILL buyers and Billtrust suppliers, so it tests one route between two platforms rather than supplier portals in general.

Archana Prasad, senior vice-president of payments and financial services at BILL, described supplier portals as “friction points, requiring a person to manually complete what should be an automated step”. Kunal Patel, senior vice-president of payments at Billtrust, set out the condition Billtrust attaches to the idea: “Agentic commerce will only move forward if businesses can trust agents to operate across systems with the same clarity and accountability they expect from people.”

Fraud controls arriving in stages

Visa Commercial Fraud Solutions covers three points in a commercial card payment. Supplier validation checks that a payment goes to the intended supplier. Virtual authentication verifies the person using a virtual card through 3-D Secure. Payment controls let a business set limits by spend, merchant category, location and timing.

Only the last of those is on general release, and only to eligible issuing banks in the countries Visa supports. The two still in pilot cover the first two pressures Visa names in its release: verifying suppliers and authenticating card users.

Visa cites a projection from Juniper Research, which expects global B2B virtual card payments to reach $14.6tn (£10.9tn) by 2029, or 83% of the virtual card market. Visa says that as adoption grows, organizations face more pressure to verify suppliers, authenticate users and confirm payments are made as intended.

Who the card push serves

SESA 2.0, the remaining part of the announcement, is aimed at banks rather than finance teams. It scores suppliers on how likely they are to accept commercial cards and estimates the value of moving that spend onto card. Visa says the original SESA tool has helped financial institutions find more than $600bn (£448bn) of potential card spend since it launched, a figure that covers 2021 to 2026.

The pilot release also says buyer platforms such as BILL could extend card payments to suppliers that until now took automated payments mainly by automated clearing house (ACH) bank transfer or check. For suppliers, it points to faster portal payments and fewer days sales outstanding. For buyers, the gain BILL describes is staff time returned to the finance team.

Darren Parslow, global head of Visa Commercial Solutions, put the three announcements together: “Businesses are moving quickly to automate the work around payments, from identifying supplier opportunities to approving invoices and executing transactions.”

For finance directors, the job of keying card numbers into supplier portals now has a working automated route between two platforms, one approved invoice at a time. The Visa tools that confirm the supplier and the cardholder reach general availability in 2027. In the pilot, agents rely on the buyer’s approval in BILL, Billtrust’s acceptance policy and payment controls tied to each approved payment instruction.