Visa and Lianlian complete the first real B2B intelligent agent transaction in Greater China

Author: Zheng Jiayi, Wall Street Insights

On July 24, Visa and Lianlian Digital jointly announced that they have completed their first real B2B agent transaction executed by the Lianlian AI agent LoopXPay.

This is also the first publicly disclosed such transaction in the Greater China region.

The transaction serves a small business seller.

In terms of the process, LoopXPay completed vendor sourcing, solution comparison, placing the order, and payment within a single workflow, with the entire execution running within the company’s pre-set spending control and approval parameters.

The tasks handled by LoopXPay go beyond recommending vendors; it directly links procurement decision-making with payment execution—so the company only needs to set budgets, permissions, and approval conditions in advance, and the agent can carry out day-to-day purchasing within the authorized scope, while the company retains the necessary oversight and control.

For payment institutions, whether an AI can complete a payment is only the first step.

After the agent initiates a transaction on behalf of a business, new issues that the payment chain needs to address include who grants authorization, how broad the authorization scope is, whether the transaction counterparty is trustworthy, and how to trace what happened in case of anomalies.

As an important part of the two parties’ cooperation, LoopXPay has been registered on Visa’s Trusted Agent Directory (Agentic Directory);

The directory is intended to help merchants and enterprises identify verified AI agents, and, together with Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, provide identity recognition, transparency, and spending control mechanisms for agent-based transactions.

This effectively adds an “identity registration” layer for AI agents entering the payment network. Previously, payment institutions mainly verified the cardholder, the merchant, and the device; after AI agents participate in transactions, the verification scope expands further to the software entity acting on behalf of the enterprise. However, this mechanism is still in an early deployment stage.

In the information disclosed by both parties, the transaction amount, procurement categories, specific payment instruments, and the manual confirmation checkpoints required from identity verification needs to final payment have not yet been disclosed. As a result, the outside world cannot currently determine the degree of automation or the cost of commercial replication.

Especially in B2B scenarios, procurement often involves multiple stages such as contract terms, goods acceptance, invoice handling, and cross-border compliance. Even if a single transaction can be run end-to-end and demonstrates that agents can enter the procurement and payment flow, it does not necessarily mean they can handle complex enterprise procurement.

Visa and Lianlian said that the next step is to expand the collaboration into areas such as procurement, digital advertising optimization, and B2B platform payments. Lianlian Digital proposed that its capabilities built for agent businesses will cover identity verification, transaction authorization, intelligent payments, and global funds settlement.

From the evolution of the payments industry, AI agents previously stayed mostly in customer service, marketing, and operations. Now they are starting to gain the ability to execute orders and move funds. The questions payment infrastructure needs to answer are also shifting from “how to let AI call payments” to “how to confirm who it is, how much it can spend, and who is responsible for its actions.”

When AI starts spending on behalf of enterprises, identity, authorization, and responsibility mechanisms will be more important than the payment action itself.