Revolut and Visa Execute France's First AI Agent-Initiated Card Payment Using Passkey Authentication
Revolut and Visa Execute France’s First AI Agent-Initiated Card Payment Using Passkey Authentication #
Revolut and Visa have executed what they describe as France’s first passkey-authenticated agentic card payment, completing a live transaction at software reseller Cleverbridge without any human input at the point of purchase.
Visa’s test agent, called “My Agent,” initiated the purchase using a real French consumer Revolut card. Rather than prompting for a PIN, one-time password, or a device-based challenge at checkout, the transaction was authenticated via Visa Payment Passkey (VPP), a biometric-bound credential stored on the cardholder’s device that replaces traditional step-up verification. Revolut retained its role as the issuing bank and maintained authorisation control throughout the payment.
According to the companies’ announcement, the payment ran entirely over Visa’s existing Intelligent Commerce infrastructure, applying the same card security, identity checks, and real-time fraud monitoring as a conventional card transaction. Revolut stated that the agent operated only within parameters established in advance by the customer, and that cardholders retain full control over their spending rules and limits.
The pilot is part of Visa’s Agentic Ready programme, under which the network has been running live agent-initiated checkouts with more than 30 issuing institutions across Europe since earlier this year. Cleverbridge was chosen as the test merchant because the platform already supports Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Agentic Directory, infrastructure that allows the acquiring side to recognise a verified AI agent as a known actor rather than flagging it as unverified bot traffic.
Despite completing the transaction in a production environment, the feature remains a controlled pilot and is not yet available to Revolut customers through its app. The test was designed to verify that AI-agent-led card debits can operate within Europe’s existing Strong Customer Authentication requirements, tokenisation standards, and issuer-control frameworks, without requiring a separate payment rail.
The transaction is not Europe’s first agentic card payment; Santander and Mastercard completed a comparable live transaction in Spain earlier in 2025. The Revolut-Visa test is more precisely the first in France to combine Visa’s network with passkey-based authentication.
Several operational questions remain unresolved ahead of any wider rollout, including how to define and limit an agent’s purchasing mandate, how merchant allow-lists will be administered, how spending caps will be enforced, and where chargeback liability falls when the initiating party is software rather than a human cardholder. The applicability of passkey binding to an agent session, as distinct from a standard browser session, is also unresolved.
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