Thredd joins Visa Agentic Ready programme, with Zilch among the first European issuers

Thredd has joined the Visa Agentic Ready programme, giving issuers across Europe a way to support agent-initiated payments without rebuilding their payments stack. For high-risk businesses, the interesting part is not the AI gloss; it is that the usual cardrails rules still apply, but the trust and authentication layer is being adapted for an AI agent acting on the cardholder’s behalf.

1. Thredd, which describes itself as an AI-first issuer processing platform, said the programme will let issuers across Europe participate in agent-initiated payments while keeping their existing infrastructure in place. Thredd positions itself as sitting at “the trust layer” of the payments ecosystem, which is exactly where the work gets done when a new payment initiator shows up.
2. Zilch will be among the first issuers on the platform to enable agent-initiated payments for its cardholders. In practice, the flow Thredd described is straightforward: a cardholder asks an AI agent to find a product within a set budget, the agent recommends an option, and the cardholder confirms the purchase using a Zilch card.
3. Visa Payment Passkey is part of the setup. Thredd said it confirms the cardholder’s intent through biometric authentication, while the agent then initiates the purchase with the merchant on the cardholder’s behalf. The core payments checks do not disappear: cardholder permission, issuer approval, authentication and fraud monitoring still apply.
4. Thredd’s current foundation for network enablement includes scheme tokenisation through Visa Token Service (VTS), device binding, and Visa Payment passkeys. That means the agent sees a token, not the underlying card credential, and the token is tied to a trusted device.
5. The company is also building agent-specific controls on top of that base. Thredd said these include agent tokenisation, meaning tokens scoped specifically to agents with the permissions they need, and agent fraud monitoring, with rules designed to catch patterns such as execution drift and abnormal velocity that standard models were not built for.

Philip Belamant, CEO at Zilch, said agentic commerce “represents a fundamental shift in how payments will work” and that the partnership with Thredd and Visa is meant to keep “trust, security and control” intact as AI agents become part of how customers shop and spend. For issuers and PSPs, that is the practical question: how to support agent-led checkout without losing control of permissioning, authentication, and fraud rules.