Digital Bank Revolut And Visa Complete Passkey-Authenticated Agentic Payment In France

Visa (NYSE: V) and Revolut have completed a tightly controlled live test in which an artificial intelligence agent initiated a real purchase on a French Revolut Visa card, authenticated through Visa Payment Passkeys rather than a one-time code, PIN or manual card entry.

The trial, announced on 7 September 2026, took place inside Visa’s Agentic Ready programme. Visa’s test agent, known as My Agent, placed an order with the merchant Cleverbridge using genuine card credentials.

Authentication ran through Visa Payment Passkey, a biometric credential that binds the transaction to a verified cardholder and an explicit prior instruction.

No human typed card numbers or approved the payment at the moment of checkout.

The exercise was designed to show that agent-initiated payments can operate on existing rails while meeting Europe’s Strong Customer Authentication rules.

Tokenization replaced the primary account number, so the agent never handled raw card data.

Standard Visa protections—card security, identity checks and real-time fraud monitoring—remained in place.

Revolut described the run as a way to understand how such payments could work in everyday shopping without weakening customer consent or issuer controls.

The France test is part of a broader European push.

Visa launched Agentic Ready in March 2026 with more than twenty issuing partners, later expanding the list to include Revolut, Barclays, HSBC UK, ING, Klarna and others.

By July the network reported live agent-executed purchases at merchants such as lastminute.com,

Frasers, Cleverbridge and BrickDepot.

All of those transactions used Payment Passkeys to keep each payment tied to a verified user and a defined mandate.

Payment Passkeys sit on the same tokenised infrastructure that already powers Click to Pay.

They allow a consumer to set spending limits and permitted categories in advance; the agent then acts only inside those boundaries. Issuers can apply risk scoring and configurable controls.

Visa says this approach supports regulatory compliance while preparing the network for a future in which software agents routinely shop on behalf of people.

Revolut, which reports several million customers in France, has positioned itself as an early participant rather than a late adopter.

The company has separately made Revolut Pay compatible with Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, signalling that it wants its credentials usable across multiple agent platforms.

The September pilot, however, remains closed: no consumer-facing feature has been switched on inside the Revolut app.

Industry observers note that Mastercard has pursued a parallel path with its Agent Pay programme. Both networks are racing to define standards before agentic commerce moves from pilots to everyday use.

The French transaction does not open the floodgates; it simply demonstrates that a passkey-authenticated, tokenised payment can be completed by an agent under current European rules.

If the model scales, shoppers could instruct an assistant to find a product, compare prices and pay without ever opening a checkout page. The infrastructure test by Visa and Revolut suggests the technical and regulatory pieces are beginning to fit together, even if consumer rollout remains some way off.