Visa is preparing the rails for AI agents to shop and pay on South Africans’ behalf – and a deepening global partnership with OpenAI has added fresh impetus to that effort.

As TechCentral reported earlier this month, Visa has enrolled local banks in its Agentic Ready programme, which prepares financial institutions to process fully autonomous AI-driven transactions, though none has gone live in South Africa yet. Lineshree Moodley, country head for Visa South Africa, set out the local roll-out at a media roundtable in Sandton.

Last week, at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, Visa deepened its partnership with OpenAI to embed its payment network directly into agentic AI experiences. OpenAI was already a founding partner in Visa’s Intelligent Commerce initiative, launched in April 2025; the new agreement takes that integration further.

Under the agreement, Visa will supply its global network, tokenisation infrastructure and fraud monitoring to support autonomous transactions initiated by AI agents within OpenAI platforms.

The companies will also explore enterprise applications, including developer workflows powered by Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. Transactions will run within user-defined boundaries – spending limits, approved merchant categories and required authorisations – using tokenised Visa credentials with real-time fraud detection.

“AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in a statement. “As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless.”

Agentic commerce

OpenAI’s head of commerce partnerships, Marco Mahrus, said the integration was about building infrastructure for “secure, transparent and user-controlled agentic transactions”.

Read: Visa opens its first South African data centre

Consumer appetite remains the complication. Visa’s own Stay Secure 2026 study, conducted by Wakefield Research across 17 markets including South Africa, found that only 23% of South African consumers would trust an AI agent to complete a purchase on their behalf. The OpenAI deal is likely to accelerate the roll-out of the underlying technology, but it does nothing to close that trust gap. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media