mBank and Visa Complete Poland's First AI Agent-Initiated Transaction

mBank and Visa announced that Poland has seen its first purchase transaction initiated independently by an artificial intelligence agent acting on behalf of a cardholder. The purchase took place in a real online store, on existing payment infrastructure, rather than in a test environment.

The Visa Agentic Ready program, under which the transaction took place, launched in Europe a few weeks earlier, with partner banks in individual countries expected to gradually roll out support for payments initiated by AI agents. mBank was one of the Polish banks named as a partner of the program when it was first announced. Now the country has seen its first real, documented transaction of this kind.

How agentic purchasing works

In the agentic commerce model, artificial intelligence is not limited to searching for products and comparing prices. Once a user sets rules such as a maximum amount, product category, or preferred merchant, the agent can complete the purchase on its own, without requiring the human to confirm each individual transaction.

This requires a different approach to security than a standard card payment in an online store. mBank and Visa emphasize that the transaction relied on card number tokenization, user identity verification, and real-time fraud monitoring. An additional layer of protection comes from Visa Payment Passkeys, a mechanism designed to meet the EU's strong customer authentication requirements, which also apply to automatically initiated transactions.

Working with Visa on the Agentic Ready program lets us take part in the next stage of commerce's evolution - Jagoda Wierzbicka, Director of the Payments and Cards Department at mBank

AI agents have proven they can initiate transactions in the real world - Mateusz Oleksy, President of Visa Poland

Why now

Visa has spent months publishing data showing growing trust among Polish consumers in AI assistants for purchasing decisions, particularly around travel planning. The company reports that nearly one in five Polish tourists uses AI regularly when organizing trips, with another sizable group doing so occasionally. The scale of that growth, sixfold over the past year, was one of the arguments for speeding up the rollout of agentic payments in the Polish market.

For banks and payment networks, agentic commerce represents a new type of risk, but also a new sales channel. If consumers actually start entrusting agents with decisions about specific purchases, control over the timing and method of transaction authorization will become a key competitive battleground among payment infrastructure providers.

What it means for Polish businesses

For online retailers operating in Poland, this means preparing their systems for traffic generated not by browsers operated by humans, but by agents acting automatically on customers' behalf. That requires adapting fraud-detection mechanisms that have so far relied largely on analyzing behavior typical of humans, such as clicking speed or cursor movement patterns.

mBank said further rollouts of agentic payments under its partnership with Visa will expand gradually, and that lessons from the first transaction will be used to refine authorization rules and security limits. The bank has not yet given a timeline for making the feature more broadly available to individual customers.

What's next

Visa says the Agentic Ready program will expand to further European countries and additional banking partners in the coming months. Thanks to its partnership with mBank, Poland is among the first group of markets where agentic payments have moved from announcement to a real, documented transaction.

Sources: mBank and Visa complete first transaction initiated by an AI Agent (isbtech.pl)