At Money 20/20 in Riyadh on day two. With me here is Godfrey Sullivan, Senior Vice President and Head of Products and Solutions for Central, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa at Visa — a founding partner of this year's event. Godfrey, welcome to Wall Street to Mena. What does being a founding partner of Money 20/20 in Riyadh mean for you on the ground?
It is incredibly important that we are founding partners of Money 20/20 in Riyadh. For us, this is the central hub of fintech activity across the Middle East. If you go around the exhibits today, hall after hall, you will see not only the most innovative companies, but the leadership of those companies gathered together at this event. In a short period of time, we can work with many of our most important partners and further the business. We are delighted to be here.
From where you sit leading products for this entire region, what are you seeing that tells you where payments are headed next?
There are three important trends we are observing across the region. We work with about 700 financial institutions across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The first trend is around the tailoring and customisation of financial products for different segments — we recently launched our Infinite proposition for the affluent, ultra-high-net-worth, and high-net-worth segments, as well as a Visa Value card for lower segments in parts of Africa. Second, we see agentic commerce just at the tipping point of adoption. And third, stablecoins — and we can go into that in more detail.
Visa launched the Intelligent Commerce programme across the region with over 30 issuers now testing AI agent-initiated payments. Walk us through what that actually looks like in practice.
What we see happening now and over the next 12 months is that many of the apps on our phones that we use to research and compare products will now be enabled with the ability for those agents to pay for those products. We will not need to go to a separate website link and enter card details. Visa's Intelligent Commerce programme is enabling agent commerce in a fully authentic experience. Three things need to happen to make this possible. First, banks need to tokenise their credentials so customers can upload them into an AI agent like ChatGPT or others. Second, merchants need to get ready — Visa works with 175 million merchants, but not all their websites and apps are set up to deal with an agent — many will block an agent transaction, thinking it might be fraud. And third, we need the trust layer from Visa to ensure that the trust and security you have when you transact in a shop or put your card online is replicated when you hand over to an agent to complete transactions for you.
With an AI agent making purchasing decisions for someone, how do you maintain trust and verify identity without a human in the loop?
We have spent a lot of time with our Visa Intelligent Commerce platform making sure that all the components of a secure transaction in the online world are replicated in the agent world. The agent is only given clear instructions from the consumer to execute a payment. We have authentication ensuring the card uploaded is linked to you as the end customer. We have a dispute process that works just as it does in the offline world. We have replicated the trust parts of the ecosystem for the era of agentic commerce.
Thank you so much Godfrey for all your insights today.
Always a pleasure.
