Be the payment option agents can see and customers can trust. In 2030, we estimate that more than 30% of online commerce could run through AI agents, representing close to $3.1 trillion in transactions.¹ Those projections should immediately focus the minds of every payments leader on strategy. Why? Because the entire logic of how payments compete is about to change.

For decades, payments platforms mattered because they converted human intent into completed transactions. But they didn’t influence what a customer chose to buy. Now they do.  As people enable AI agents to take control of the purchase journey, agents can compress every step from discovery to checkout into a single, optimized and automated decision layer, including payment selection.

Millennials helped turn digital commerce into a daily shopping habit. They came of age with smartphones, mobile apps, social platforms and one-click checkout. Now they’re pushing shopping into its next phase, where search, AI tools and merchant apps compete for attention before a purchase ever reaches checkout.

At the same time, the data also shows a grounded reality. Millennials may be digital shoppers, but they’re not done with physical stores. They still buy groceries mostly in person and make frequent trips to the store. They blend old habits with new tools, moving between aisles, apps, search engines, AI assistants and online marketplaces.

Digital wallets are projected to account for roughly half of all point-of-sale and e-commerce transactions by 2027. This, in addition to buy-now-pay-later options and merchants promoting their own cards, has made earning and maintaining cardholder loyalty a critical challenge. This playbook explores how card issuers can build customer loyalty by moving AI from background infrastructure to real-time, customer-facing decisioning by using the Earn, Keep, Protect strategic framework. This framework serves as a guide for program marketing leaders seeking to prioritize AI deployment across the cardholder lifecycle.

Worldpay new global research reveals how intelligent agents are reshaping how consumers discover, compare and manage what they buy – and what merchants can do to prepare for the industry’s biggest shift since e-commerce.

We surveyed 8,000 consumers across seven countries to understand how ready they are to let AI act on their behalf. The results are clear: Curiosity is high, but trust is the key to adoption.

Visa has enabled live agentic commerce transactions across Europe, letting AI agents complete purchases with participating merchants. The transactions mark a shift from testing within controlled environments to live purchases at participating merchant websites, with agents browsing products, selecting items and initiating payments within parameters set by consumers.

In addition, the transactions are enabled through Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa’s portfolio of initiatives supporting AI-driven commerce. They rely on explicit consumer authorisation, with agents operating within user-defined controls rather than acting independently of the cardholder’s instructions. Visa has worked with more than 30 European card issuers to support these transactions, alongside merchants including lastminute.com, Frasers, Cleverbridge and BrickDepot, spanning the travel, retail and ecommerce sectors.

Square announced a new ChatGPT app and Claude plugin, helping sellers get discovered and transact at the exact moment customers are making purchasing decisions through AI-powered conversations. Square was built to help sellers accept payments where their customers are. This foundation has expanded to helping sellers reach customers across key digital channels, from search and maps to social and marketplaces. As consumers increasingly turn to AI to decide where to eat, shop, and book services, Square is extending this approach to help businesses show up with accurate information and – in supported AI experiences – directly order within these channels.

With the European payments sector undergoing rapid modernisation, critical questions around investment, regulation, and market alignment are dominating the agendas of banks, fintechs, regulators, payments providers, and technology providers. To uncover the practical choices defining today’s market, Finextra Research surveyed 195 industry professionals in April 2026 across Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Belgium. 

Running a business online comes with numerous challenges due to the fast-moving environment , where customer expectations are higher, competition is just a click away, and technology keeps evolving. Still, moving online is clearly worth it.

In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), 73% of people shop online, so if your business isn’t there, you’re missing a large share of customers. The European e-commerce market itself is huge, too, expected to reach €353.5 billion in 2026 and keep growing.