Santander and Visa Deliver Latin America’s First End-to-End Payments Powered by AI Agents

WHY THIS MATTERS: This strategic pilot between Banco Santander and Visa represents a foundational step in legitimizing agentic commerce, transforming AI-driven shopping from a futuristic concept into a secure, transactional reality. The significance lies in the successful demonstration of delegated, consent-driven payments across five distinct and regulated Latin American markets. By utilizing the Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC) framework, the partners are not just testing technology; they are establishing a blueprint for governance, security, and interoperability that is essential for scaling AI-initiated transactions globally. This outcome proves that automated purchasing agents can operate within existing card network and regulatory standards, a crucial development for issuers concerned about fraud and liability. For the industry, this is an early and vital move toward mainstreaming delegated payments, shifting the focus from simply optimizing checkout to automating the entire consumer discovery and fulfillment process through trusted AI proxies.

Banco Santander and Visa today announced a strategic collaboration that marks the successful completion of Banco Santander’s first controlled pilot agentic commerce transactions in multiple Latin America markets. This milestone, conducted across five markets in the region (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay) was powered by Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC), demonstrating a breakthrough in how consumers can securely delegate shopping tasks to trusted AI agents.

Visa Intelligent Commerce provides a suite of integrated technology capabilities that leverage Visa’s secure infrastructure to enable safe, transparent and consent-driven transactions initiated by AI agents on behalf of consumers, all while adhering to strict compliance and security standards. Through this collaboration, Banco Santander and Visa are advancing practical agentic commerce use cases and helping establish a framework to support responsible and scalable adoption across the region.

AI agents successfully completed the purchase of books across Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, while in Brazil the transaction involved the purchase of chocolates, providing a tangible proof point of cross-market execution.

“This is a major step toward making AI-assisted shopping a practical reality,” said Matías Sánchez, global head of Cards and Digital Solutions at Banco Santander. “By testing real transactions, we demonstrated how these technologies act as enablers of secure, interoperable agentic commerce that maintains strong consumer protections and issuer controls.”

“The pilot with Santander marks a defining moment for commerce in Latin America. Through Visa Intelligent Commerce, we’re laying the foundation for AI-driven transactions that are secure, seamless and built for scale — ensuring every player in the ecosystem is ready for what comes next,” said Catalina Tobar, head of Growth Products and Partnerships for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean.

From Concept to Reality: The Latin American Pilot

Banco Santander and Visa have demonstrated through a controlled pilot with credentials from five Latin American markets that AI agents can securely initiate payments on behalf of consumers within defined consent parameters. The pilot validated key elements of the consumer journey, including consent capture, secure data handling, and interoperability across merchants and payment networks.

The pilot was executed within Visa and Banco Santander’s regulated payment framework and under existing parameters and supervisory standards.

New research from Visa indicates that over 70% of Latin American consumers have already integrated AI into their shopping journeys. As consumer behavior shifts, agentic commerce is poised to become a reality in 2026, reshaping how people discover, verify and buy.

FF NEWS TAKE: This collaboration unequivocally moves the needle by providing the first secure, multi-market proof-of-concept for AI-driven transactions. The controlled testing establishes the necessary foundation of trust for issuers and regulators. The essential next step to watch is how quickly Visa and Santander transition from purchasing low-value items to enabling complex, high-value AI-assisted services, such as subscriptions, travel, and wealth management. The adoption speed of this underlying infrastructure by other major global banks will determine the pace of agentic commerce adoption in 2026.