Four Malaysian Banks Join Visa’s AI Payment Testing Programme

Visa has launched Visa Agentic Ready, a programme designed to help banks test and prepare for AI-initiated payments, as part of a wider Asia Pacific rollout announced on 6 May 2026. In Malaysia, Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad, CIMB Bank Berhad, Hong Leong Bank, and Maybank are among the first issuers globally to join the programme.

The Shift Toward Automated Payments

Agentic commerce refers to a model where AI systems act on a user’s behalf to complete purchases, rather than the user manually initiating each transaction. An AI assistant could, for example, book a flight, order groceries, or renew a subscription automatically based on a user’s preferences and permissions, with payment completed without the user needing to tap or confirm each time.

This is not entirely new territory for Malaysia. Earlier this year, Mastercard completed a similar pilot with CIMB and RHB, where an AI agent arranged and paid for a ride from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to KL Sentral. Visa’s programme takes a broader approach, focusing on preparing issuers across the ecosystem to handle these transaction types at scale.

Inside The Visa Agentic Ready Programme

Visa Agentic Ready provides a structured, production-grade testing environment where banks can experience how agent-initiated transactions work in practice before they become mainstream. The programme uses Visa’s existing network capabilities, including tokenisation, identity verification, and risk controls, to test how trusted agent-initiated payments could be enabled across different use cases.

The focus in this first phase is on issuers rather than merchants, giving banks a structured way to assess their readiness and build confidence in the new payment model. Additional partners from merchant and ecosystem enabler categories are expected to join as the programme expands.

What This Means For Consumers

For everyday users, agentic payments are not yet available. The programme is a preparatory step, not a consumer-facing product launch. However, the involvement of four of Malaysia’s major banks signals that the underlying infrastructure is being actively built and tested.

The key question for consumers will be around control. Visa has emphasised that the programme is designed to ensure consumers remain firmly in charge of how and when payments are made, with trust, security, and consumer control built into the framework. How that translates into practical settings, such as spending limits, approval requirements, and the ability to review or reverse agent-initiated transactions, will become clearer as the technology matures and moves toward wider deployment.

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