As commerce evolves into a more intelligent, automated, and agent‑driven ecosystem, businesses must rethink how they approach risk. In the age of agentic commerce, risk management can no longer operate as a separate function behind the scenes. Instead, risk and customer experience have become inseparably linked—and getting that balance right is critical to maintaining trust.
The risk challenges businesses face
Risk decisions have always shaped the customer journey. Approve too conservatively and friction appears in the form of false declines and frustration. Be too permissive and businesses expose customers to fraud. This tension is becoming more pronounced as commerce accelerates. Today, 65% of merchants report false positive, or “customer insult,” rates between 2% and 10%,¹ meaning legitimate customers are incorrectly challenged or declined. In an environment where consumers expect transactions to “just work,” those moments of friction are highly visible—and costly to trust.
At the same time, the pressure on risk systems continues to grow. Merchants’ average fraud rate by order has risen to 3.5%,¹ reflecting a landscape where threats are more persistent and adaptive. And merchants now contend with an average of 3.7 different fraud attack types each year,¹ spanning channels, devices, and use cases. As transactions increase in speed and volume—and as AI agents begin initiating purchases on behalf of consumers—static rules and siloed tools struggle to keep pace.
This challenge is compounded by operational constraints. Businesses are being asked to manage greater complexity with fewer resources. Fifty‑two percent of merchants expect spending on fraud management staffing to remain flat or decline,¹ while 45% anticipate the same for fraud technology investment.¹ As a result, 62% of merchants say reducing time spent managing fraud will be a major driver of future decisions.¹ In this environment, risk cannot rely on manual review or fragmented controls. It must be embedded directly into the transaction flow.
How Visa can help manage risk
This is where Visa adds significant value. With visibility across a global network, Visa brings a breadth of intelligence that individual participants cannot achieve alone. That network‑level view enables smarter, more contextual risk decisions—helping ensure legitimate transactions are approved while fraudulent activity is stopped in real time at the point of commerce.
This approach applies across every transaction type, from face‑to‑face purchases to digital checkouts and agent‑initiated transactions. In agentic commerce, where actions may happen automatically on a customer’s behalf, real‑time, adaptive decisioning becomes even more essential. Risk must be fast, precise, and largely invisible to the consumer.
Ultimately, reimagining risk is about businesses being able to enable trust at scale. Agentic commerce doesn’t eliminate risk—it changes its shape. Businesses that evolve beyond static rules and embrace adaptive, network‑powered intelligence will be better positioned to protect customers while delivering the seamless experiences they expect. By combining broad visibility with real‑time decisioning, Visa helps ensure that commerce remains not only intelligent and automated but trusted, so businesses can stay ahead, always.
1 2026 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report, Merchant Risk Council (MRC) – commissioned by Visa Acceptance Solutions, A Visa Company & Verifi, A Visa Company.
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