Miami, Jun 10 (EFE).- Payments company Visa is seeking to “pave the future” of e-commerce driven by artificial intelligence agents in Latin America through a new partnership with OpenAI to help digitize 93 million microbusinesses across the region, according to Visa’s Regional President for Latin America and the Caribbean, Nuno Lopes Alves.
The company announced at the Visa Payments Forum a “strategic collaboration” with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, to enable secure Visa payments within agentic commerce, in which AI agents research, compare and complete purchases on behalf of consumers and businesses.
Lopes Alves said his objective is to ensure that “all this talk of digitalization actually reaches” the final link in the chain, the so-called “long tail” of the economy in Latin America, which he described as one of Visa’s most important markets in terms of potential. If considered a single country, the region would be the world’s third-largest economy with a population of 670 million.
“Imagine all those microbusinesses and sole proprietors out there who still seem to be living in another century. In Latin America and the Caribbean, this sector represents 60% of employment. There are 93 million microbusinesses that we want to help digitize,” the executive told EFE.
Secure payments powered by artificial intelligence
Visa’s partnership with OpenAI will allow the payments company to provide its global network, authentication capabilities and security infrastructure to support agentic commerce experiences, enabling businesses and consumers to interact and conduct transactions with confidence.
One of Lopes Alves’ priorities in Latin America, since assuming his role in October, is to “pave the future of e-commerce” in the region through services such as biometric authentication and tokenization, a security process that protects sensitive information by replacing it with identification tokens.
“All of this also forms the foundation for something that sounds more futuristic but is arriving very soon: commerce operated by artificial intelligence agents. Building the future of payments involves tokenization infrastructure, biometric authentication and frictionless checkout, but at the same time these are the foundations for agentic commerce,” he said.
Across the region’s 33 countries and 18 territories, Visa sees a common trend: preparing for AI-driven commerce. This includes security processes to verify whether a buyer or seller is a real person rather than a bot or a deepfake generated through artificial intelligence.
For that reason, “Visa’s strategy begins with having the infrastructure in place to make this possible,” including bringing digital services to businesses and enabling them to verify that a purchaser is “a legitimate agent acting on behalf of a consumer with a legitimate intention to buy.”
“Artificial intelligence is extremely useful for us, but unfortunately it is also extremely useful for fraudsters. That is why, when transactions are tokenized, we are better prepared for this future of agentic commerce,” he said.
Latin America’s “enormous” potential
Latin America is typically either the fastest- or second-fastest-growing region among the five global regions in which Visa organizes its operations, Lopes Alves noted.
“With so much digitalization still ahead, there is a great deal to be done in the region. The potential is enormous. It has scale, but also a lot of room for development. And we have very strong relationships with the ecosystem in every country, making it one of our most important markets in terms of growth potential,” he said.
The executive stressed that “there is no one-size-fits-all formula for the region.” Some markets, such as Bolivia, remain heavily cash-based; others, such as Mexico, still have significant room for greater financial inclusion; while countries like Chile are more mature, Brazil presents unique challenges.
Nevertheless, Visa identifies five common trends across Latin America: the expansion of tokenization, preparation for AI-powered commerce, real-time payments, transactions using stablecoins, and the digitalization of microbusinesses. EFE