Visa Intelligent Commerce is Visa's agentic payments program. The Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) sits underneath it as an open framework letting merchants tell legitimate AI agents apart from scrapers and fraud bots.
TAP is significant because the rest of the agent payments stack — Link, Mastercard Agent Pay, MPP — quietly assumes "the agent on the other end is real and authorized." Without an identity layer, that assumption breaks.
Key things to know
Open framework
TAP is meant to be implemented by any agent and any merchant, not just Visa-network participants.
Solves a real gap
Pre-TAP, merchants had no robust way to allowlist agents without also allowlisting scrapers. Post-TAP, agents can present a verifiable identity.
vs. CardForAgent
TAP is identity infrastructure; CardForAgent is a card issuer. As TAP propagates, agents using CardForAgent's cards will benefit from being verifiable to merchants — but the integration happens at the network layer, not in our API.