The Indian digital payments landscape is arguably one of the most dynamic and rapidly evolving financial ecosystems on the planet. Over the last decade, the country has witnessed a tectonic shift, leapfrogging traditional banking phases to embrace sweeping digital public infrastructure. However, while the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and mobile wallets dominate current headlines, the financial technology sector is already preparing for its next monumental pivot. According to Rishi Chhabra, Country Manager for India at Visa, the future of digital transactions will be defined by a radical new paradigm: Agentic Commerce.
Speaking recently at the Exchange4media Pitch BFSI Summit, Chhabra delivered a compelling vision for the next phase of digital commerce, emphasizing that as artificial intelligence becomes deeply integrated into our daily lives, trust will emerge as the absolute bedrock of the payment ecosystem. As India transitions from a mobile-first to an AI-first economy, the mechanics of how we buy, sell, and authenticate are about to undergo a profound transformation.
Decoding Agentic Commerce: Agent-Led, Human-Controlled
To understand the future of payments, one must first understand the concept of “agentic commerce.” In the current digital landscape, e-commerce requires active human participation at every step: consumers must browse, add items to a cart, manually enter payment details or scan a QR code, and authorize the transaction. Agentic commerce flips this model by prioritizing consumer autonomy through the delegation of purchasing tasks to artificial intelligence.
In this impending ecosystem, consumers will increasingly allow AI agents to act on their behalf. Imagine a highly intuitive AI assistant that monitors your household inventory, recognizes when you are running low on essential supplies, and independently places an order. The AI agent initiates the payment using secure backend technologies like tokenization and passkeys. The human user’s involvement is reduced to a final, frictionless biometric approval—a quick facial scan or fingerprint touch.
As Chhabra elegantly summarized, the future of the industry will facilitate “agent-led, human-controlled commerce”. The friction of manual data entry and multi-step checkouts will vanish, replaced by smart systems that anticipate needs and execute transactions flawlessly. However, for this autonomous future to materialize, the underlying framework must be virtually impenetrable.
Trust as the Ultimate Payment Layer
When a machine is initiating payments on your behalf, the stakes for cybersecurity and consumer confidence are astronomically high. Chhabra argues that this next phase of digital commerce will be built entirely around a new layer of trust. If AI agents are to become our financial proxies, the trust frameworks, authentication protocols, and dispute mechanisms must be rock solid.
Tokenization is the critical technological pillar supporting this new trust layer. In a tokenized transaction, the actual 16-digit card number is never stored by the merchant or transmitted across the network. Instead, it is replaced by a unique cryptographic token. Even if a merchant’s database is compromised and a token is stolen, it is entirely useless anywhere else, thereby nullifying the threat of mass data breaches.
Working closely with Indian regulators over the past four to five years, Visa has aggressively rolled out this technology. Globally, Visa manages over 15 billion tokenized credentials; remarkably, roughly 500 million of those are currently active in India alone. This massive scale of tokenization has been instrumental in establishing consumer confidence, ensuring that the backend security “just works” without disrupting the user experience.
The Coexistence of UPI and Payment Cards
A recurring narrative in Indian financial media is the perceived existential threat that UPI poses to traditional payment cards. Chhabra strongly refutes this zero-sum perspective. While acknowledging that UPI fundamentally changed consumer behavior and proved the viability of instant mobile payments, he views the expansion as highly additive to the overall ecosystem.
The reality is that India still presents a massive untapped opportunity. Despite the digital payment boom, close to 50% of transactions in India remain cash-based. The goal, according to Chhabra, is growing the overall digital pie rather than fighting over existing market share. Furthermore, in a country of over a billion people, there are currently only about 55 to 60 million unique credit card holders, leaving enormous headroom for growth.
UPI and credit cards are destined to coexist because they solve fundamentally different consumer use cases. While a QR code offers unmatched utility for everyday micro-transactions, credit cards provide an emotional and experiential layer that cannot be replicated by a simple digital scan. There remains a strong “pride of ownership” associated with premium cards, alongside the tangible lifestyle benefits, rewards points, and global acceptance that consumers demand.
Future-Proofing the Tech Stack: Cloud and AI Innovations
To support the demands of agentic commerce, financial institutions must abandon sluggish legacy systems. Today’s consumers and businesses expect continuous, rapid innovation. Legacy systems that take quarters or even months to launch new products are a massive liability.
Recognizing this, Visa acquired Pismo, a cloud-native card issuing and management platform. This strategic acquisition allows banks to manage debit, credit, and prepaid cards on a single, unified cloud stack that integrates seamlessly with core banking systems. Consequently, financial institutions can now launch new products and features in a matter of weeks, matching the agility required in the modern fintech space.
Simultaneously, Visa is leveraging its deep history with artificial intelligence to fortify the ecosystem against evolving threats. Visa pioneered AI-driven fraud detection systems as early as 1993 and has invested $12 billion in cutting-edge security technologies over the past five years. Between October 2022 and September 2023, Visa’s AI-driven fraud-fighting solutions saved customers an estimated $40 billion globally.
The Crucial Role of Financial Literacy
While the infrastructure for agentic commerce is rapidly maturing, technological readiness must be matched by consumer readiness. Chhabra noted that while India has repeatedly leapfrogged through successive waves of technology, “caution is the right word” as new AI paradigms emerge.
Building a trusted digital payments ecosystem requires a continuous commitment to consumer education. Visa is actively addressing this through initiatives like the Digital Village program, which, in partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) Common Service Centre Academy, educated 50,000 rural citizens—half of them women—on digital literacy and payment security.
As India marches toward an AI-driven economic future, the vision laid out by Rishi Chhabra is both exhilarating and grounded. Agentic commerce promises unparalleled convenience, but it will only thrive if consumers implicitly trust the invisible digital agents acting on their behalf. By heavily investing in tokenization, cloud-native infrastructure, and robust cybersecurity, Visa is laying the indispensable groundwork for a future where commerce is effortlessly agent-led, yet securely human-controlled.
* Conceptual illustration generated using AI