Visa Adds AI Analytics and Fraud Protection for Business Payments

San Francisco, California — Visa has announced new tools for business payments, pairing an upgraded supplier analytics platform and a fraud prevention suite for commercial virtual cards with a live pilot in which AI agents pay approved invoices through supplier portals alongside BILL and Billtrust.

The card network announced the package saying it is meant to let financial institutions, fintechs and companies automate more of their payment work while keeping the trust, visibility and control those transactions need. Not everything is available yet: two of the fraud tools remain in pilot until 2027.

Darren Parslow, global head of Visa Commercial Solutions, said: “Businesses are moving quickly to automate the work around payments, from identifying supplier opportunities to approving invoices and executing transactions.”

He added: “These capabilities are designed to help them do that with the data, security and controls they need - whether they are growing commercial card acceptance, helping protect virtual-card payments from fraud, or testing how trusted AI agents can act on their behalf.”

The first piece is SESA 2.0, a new version of Visa's Supplier Enablement Spend Analytics. According to Visa, it applies AI to spend analysis and predictive insights so clients can pick out promising suppliers, decide where to put their resources and enablement work, and put an economic value on their commercial card program.

Visa said the platform builds on four years of helping financial institutions assess supplier payment opportunities. The new release brings together scoring of suppliers by AI, Visa's own commercial payments data, benchmarks drawn from buyers and modeling of business value, with the aim of flagging suppliers that may be more likely to take card payments and sizing the potential growth in commercial card use.

Visa said financial institutions have used SESA to identify more than $600 billion in potential cardable spend since it went live, a figure based on supplier opportunities the tool identified between 2021 and 2026. Visa argues that as business payments go digital, lenders need a clear picture of where card acceptance could be won and the information to judge those openings, and that better visibility can help buyers and suppliers decide how to update the way they pay.

The second piece, Visa Commercial Fraud Solutions, focuses on virtual cards used for business payments. The suite is designed to help issuers and businesses check suppliers, authenticate virtual card activity and set controls before a payment is approved.

Visa pointed to Juniper Research projections that global B2B virtual card payment volume will reach $14.6 trillion by 2029, equal to 83% of the worldwide virtual card market. As usage grows, the company said, organizations face more pressure to verify the suppliers they pay, confirm who is making each payment and make sure money arrives where it was meant to go.

The suite covers three stages of a commercial payment. Visa Commercial Supplier Validation helps confirm that funds reach the intended supplier, and Visa Commercial Virtual Authentication checks commercial virtual card users through 3-D Secure authentication. Visa Commercial Payment Controls lets businesses set limits on individual transactions by spend, merchant category, location and timing.

Only Payment Controls is available today, to eligible issuing financial institutions in supported countries and territories. Supplier Validation and Virtual Authentication are still being piloted, and Visa expects to make them generally available in 2027.

The third piece is the agent pilot with BILL and Billtrust, which the three companies had announced in Las Vegas calling it the first live pilot of its kind. In it, trusted AI agents initiate and complete invoice payments that a business has already approved, working directly through supplier portals.

The setup uses Visa Intelligent Commerce and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol to establish the agent's identity, confirm it has permission to act and keep each transaction within the controls and visibility a business sets. The agent works with tokenized payment credentials rather than shared logins for supplier portals, and the pilot links invoice approval on the buyer's side with payment acceptance on the supplier's side.

According to the joint release, the BILL Payment Agent is registered through the Trusted Agent Protocol and Visa's Agentic Directory, and Billtrust uses the protocol to recognize and authenticate it. That check can replace the CAPTCHA tests and other bot-blocking measures portals have traditionally relied on, without the agent needing an extra login. The agent does not decide what to pay; it only executes eligible payments the buyer has already approved.

Mark Nelsen, SVP and Head of Product, Commercial and Money Movement Solutions at Visa, said: “Businesses should not have to choose between automation and control when making payments.”

He added: “This pilot applies agentic commerce to a real B2B-payment problem, by having trusted agents complete payments across platforms. Working with BILL and Billtrust, we are testing how identity, payment controls and transaction visibility can make that model work.”

Visa said the pilot is live and processing end-to-end transactions with participating BILL customers and Billtrust suppliers. BILL, based in San Jose, California, says nearly half a million businesses and their accountants use its platform, while Billtrust reports more than 20 million buyers and $1 trillion in annual trade credit volume on its network.

The companies said buyer platforms such as BILL could use the model to extend card payments to suppliers that have mostly been paid automatically by ACH or check. If that happens at scale, it could widen the pool of card spend that tools like SESA 2.0 are built to find, although the pilot is so far limited to participating customers.

Visa framed the announcement around trust as the condition for automation to scale. The company said the future of commercial payments may depend not only on how fast money moves but on whether every participant, credential and action can be identified, authenticated and governed, and that it is investing across the payment process so businesses know who is acting, what has been authorized and how payments are completed.

Visa already uses AI to screen for fraud and says it blocks $40 billion in fraudulent activity each year. The company has also been expanding its business payments offering in the Middle East. Earlier this month, Visa and Dubai-based NymCard introduced Nym4Business, a commercial payments platform that enables banks and non-bank financial institutions across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) to issue commercial cards with spending controls.