AI could reshape commerce. Trust will drive it.

At Money20/20 Middle East in Riyadh, the conversation around payments has moved well beyond whether consumers are ready to go digital. The next question is: what happens when the technology that makes the purchase starts acting on the consumer’s behalf?

In an exclusive chat on the sidelines of the event, Ali Bailoun, SVP and Group GM for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Oman at Visa, spoke about how the payments landscape is changing across the region.

Visa returned to Money20/20 Middle East in 2026 as a founding partner, with agentic commerce, digital identity, and the future of money movement among the themes shaping its presence at the event.

FROM DIGITAL TO AI-ASSISTED COMMERCE 

So, where is money headed? 

“Connectivity across the ecosystem has evolved significantly,” Bailoun says. “The focus now is on reducing fragmentation, improving interoperability, and making sure global capabilities work effectively within local markets’ requirements.”

In Saudi Arabia, Visa recently announced that merchants and payment service providers can now process e-commerce transactions locally and compliantly using the Visa Acceptance Platform. Enabled by the platform’s deployment on local cloud infrastructure, announced last year, the capability supports locally processed e-commerce payments while helping deliver seamless consumer payment experiences.

Cross-border payments and money movement remain important growth areas, as consumers increasingly expect to pay, get paid and move money with the same simplicity and convenience.

Bailoun points to a progression from digitisation to tokenisation, and now increasingly toward AI-enabled commerce experiences.  

The next shift could be agentic commerce, where AI systems can act on consumers’ behalf to find products, make decisions, and eventually complete transactions with human supervision. While agentic commerce is advancing rapidly, adoption will ultimately depend on consumer trust, clear authorization models and the trusted infrastructure needed to support transactions safely at scale.

WHY THE REGION IS THE BEDROCK OF INNOVATION

The Middle East enters this transition with several advantages. Bailoun says the region already has sophisticated banking infrastructure, with consumers in many Gulf markets able to open accounts and obtain cards within minutes. Saudi Arabia’s progress is reflected in the fact that electronic payments now account for approximately 85% of retail payments in the Kingdom.

That digital familiarity matters because the move toward agentic commerce is unlikely to happen in isolation. It will build on habits consumers have already developed around online shopping, digital payments, and delivery.

However, speed is only one part of the equation.

Bailoun says the broader payments ecosystem also needs to evolve, bringing together technology, regulation, and partnerships. Embedded finance and payments will become increasingly important as financial services are integrated into the experiences consumers already use.

“The challenge is often less about developing a global solution than making it work within individual markets,” Bailoun adds.

Saudi Arabia, he points out, has been open to working with partners to enable that localisation.

THE TRUST TEST 

The opportunity for agentic commerce comes with a corresponding shift in the risk landscape. As more transactions move across wallets, platforms, and AI-driven interfaces, the number of places where fraud can occur also grows.

Charles Lobo, Senior Vice President and Regional Risk Officer for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at Visa, says the change is already visible. “Money is moving in more ways, across more channels and through many more participants than ever before,” Lobo says.

The past five years, he adds, have brought more change to payments than the previous 50, alongside the growth of tokenization and digital payment acceptance.

The expansion also changes the nature of the threat.

“Every new rail, platform, and touchpoint can create a new entry point for criminal activity,” Lobo says. “The attack surface has expanded, and commerce no longer happens within controlled environments.”

That matters particularly as AI begins to take a more active role in transactions.

Lobo describes AI as a “force multiplier” for both criminals and defenders, enabling attacks to be faster, more personalized, and easier to scale, while also giving institutions new ways to detect evolving patterns and respond in real time.

For Visa, that means fraud prevention needs to move earlier in the customer journey rather than relying solely on authorisation at the point of payment.

From July to December 2025, Visa identified nearly $1 billion in scam-related activity globally, making scams the largest category of consumer payment fraud, according to the company.

WHEN TRUST GETS THE FINAL SAY

The challenge is not only technological. It also depends on whether consumers are willing to hand control of a transaction to an AI system.

Lobo cites Visa’s Stay Secure 2026 research, which found that 82% of consumers across Central Europe, the Middle East, and Africa believe AI will play a critical role in protecting them from online fraud.

In Saudi Arabia, 93% say AI-powered tools make online shopping faster and easier.

Yet confidence falls when the AI moves from assisting the consumer to actually completing the payment.

Only 27% of consumers across the region said they trust AI agents to make payments on their behalf, rising to 33% in Saudi Arabia.

That gap could become one of the defining questions for agentic commerce.

Consumers may be comfortable with AI helping them decide what to buy, but handing over the final transaction requires a different level of trust. 

Security, he argues, cannot be added after the experience has been designed. It has to be built into the system from the beginning without creating unnecessary friction.

SECURITY MOVES UPSTREAM

That also changes how financial institutions need to think about fraud.

Lobo says the focus needs to shift from simply making a better authorization decision to identifying risk earlier in the customer journey and disrupting criminal activity before it reaches the transaction.

AI is making that more urgent because attackers can move faster than traditional rules and manual review processes were designed to handle.

But technology alone is not the silver bullet. As transactions move between financial institutions, merchants, technology providers, and platforms, Lobo says no organization can maintain a complete view of the threat landscape on its own.

“Protecting commerce is a shared responsibility,” he says.

For Bailoun, the same principle applies to Visa’s approach to agentic commerce.

Visa is focused on providing the trust layer that enables partners to scale intelligent commerce, including authentication, permissions, controls, tokenization and authorization frameworks that help transactions remain trusted and accountable.

Visa has also invested more than $13 billion in technology over the past five years, with a significant focus on its network, cybersecurity, and fraud prevention capabilities, Lobo says.

The goal is to apply the same security, fraud prevention and trust mechanisms that underpin today’s payment experiences to emerging AI-driven commerce experiences.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

There is still no clear timeline for when agentic commerce will become mainstream.

Bailoun says Visa is seeing very rapid adoption, but the pace will depend on how quickly consumers and businesses become comfortable with the technology.

He believes the region has an advantage.

Consumers across the Middle East are already accustomed to digital payments, online shopping, and delivery services. That familiarity could make the transition to allowing AI agents to act on their behalf less disruptive than the earlier move from physical retail to e-commerce.

“The adoption could be faster than many previous technology transitions because consumers across the region are already accustomed to digital payments, online shopping and delivery services,” Bailoun says.

But speed alone will not be enough.

The next stage of commerce will depend on whether the industry can deliver AI-enabled experiences that are as intuitive, secure and reliable as consumers expect.