Visa rolls out AI-driven tools for B2B payments
Visa announced a set of new tools aimed at increasing confidence and oversight in the evolving world of business payments. The rollout adds deeper supplier-spend analytics, safeguards for virtual-card fraud, and a live pilot that lets trusted artificial-intelligence agents finish B2B invoice transactions.
Enhanced Capabilities
At the core of the update is SESA 2.0, the second generation of Supplier Enablement Spend Analytics. This platform blends artificial-intelligence-driven spend analysis with predictive insight, allowing clients to pinpoint suppliers that present the strongest growth potential. It also incorporates supplier scoring, Visa commercial-payments data, buyer benchmarks and a business-value model that together create a detailed picture of where card acceptance could expand.
Alongside the analytics suite, Visa introduced Visa Commercial Fraud Solutions, a collection of features built to help issuers and merchants confirm the legitimacy of suppliers, verify virtual-card activity and enforce controls before any payment is cleared. The solution protects three critical points in a commercial transaction, supplier validation, virtual authentication and payment controls, and is already available to eligible financial institutions in supported regions.
Live Agentic Pilot
A live pilot conducted with BILL and Billtrust demonstrates how trusted AI agents can initiate and assist with approved invoice payments directly through supplier portals. The experiment uses Visa Intelligent Commerce together with the company’s Trusted Agent Protocol, showing a practical path for automating the end-to-end invoice workflow.
“Businesses are moving quickly to automate the work around payments, from identifying supplier opportunities to approving invoices and executing transactions,” said Darren Parslow, global head of Visa Commercial Solutions.
Commercial Card Growth
SESA 2.0 equips financial institutions with the ability to locate suppliers that are more likely to accept commercial-card payments, and to estimate the size of those opportunities. Since the tool’s launch, the analytics engine has uncovered more than $600 billion in spend that could be processed with a card.
Strengthening Trust in Commercial Virtual Card Payments
Research firm Juniper Research projects that global B2B virtual-card volume will climb to $14.6 trillion by 2029, accounting for 83% of the worldwide virtual-card market. This surge shows the importance of robust security measures for virtual-card transactions.
Visa Commercial Virtual Authentication, part of the suite, helps verify commercial virtual card users through 3-D Secure authentication, providing an additional layer of security for these transactions. Furthermore, Visa Commercial Supplier Validation and Visa Commercial Virtual Authentication are currently in pilot and will be generally available in 2027, further enhancing the security and trust in commercial virtual card payments.
