22/12/2025 05:27 AST
Visa and Aldar have announced a strategic collaboration that marks the first live implementation of Visa Intelligent Commerce in the region, introducing end-to-end, voice-enabled agentic payment experiences.
Through this collaboration, Aldar introduces an initial agentic use case focused on routine and repetitive transactions that can be streamlined through AI agents, offering customers greater convenience while maintaining transparency and control. In the coming weeks, Visa cardholders in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be able to use an AI agent on both Live Aldar and the Aldar website to seamlessly pay their real estate service charges, with additional capabilities to be rolled out in 2026.
As part of the launch phase, the first transaction saw a customer pay their real estate service charges on the Live Aldar mobile app, through an AI agent who took the customer through a simple, consent-led flow, confirming their details, and completing the transaction on their behalf within seconds. The transaction was completed using an Emirates NBD Darna Visa Credit Card, an exclusive co-branded credit card linked to Aldar's digital loyalty platform, Darna.
With Live Aldar, customers can manage their relationship with Aldar in one place, from accessing services to earning and redeeming points and unlocking personalized benefits. This provides a strong platform to extend agentic commerce into everyday interactions, enabled by Aldar's digital channels and Visa's agentic transaction capabilities.
Visa Intelligent Commerce is a suite of APIs and supporting tools that helps enable secure transactions initiated by AI agents within Visa's network, operated under strict compliance and security standards. A key component is tokenization, supported by Visa's Token Management Service (TMS), helping protect customer credentials while enabling agent-initiated payments.
Harry Nakichbandi, Chief Digital Officer at Aldar, said: ''By pairing Aldar's AI agent with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we have transformed a routine payment into a customer-first experience that is secure, transparent, and almost instant. As we extend these AI-powered capabilities across Live Aldar, customers will see more value built in, from personalized offers and relevant services to Darna points and benefits that are applied automatically. It's a deliberate step in how we use AI to remove friction, enhance trust, and create signature experiences at every touchpoint.''
Godfrey Sullivan, Senior Vice President, head of products & solutions, CEMEA, Visa, said: ''This implementation with Aldar demonstrates how Visa Intelligent Commerce can support trusted, secure agent-initiated transactions on the Visa cardholder's behalf, including handling routine financial tasks. We look forward to working with Aldar as they explore additional ways to bring intelligent, convenient experiences to their customers, and to continuing our work with issuers, merchants, and ecosystem players to advance and scale agentic commerce.''
Rohit Garg, Group Head of Retail Products and RBWM Chief Digital Officer at Emirates NBD, said: ''Emirates NBD is proud to support this milestone with Visa and Aldar. Our continued collaboration with Visa over the years and our investments in secure, tokenized digital payment capabilities have enabled us to deliver seamless and trusted payment solutions for our customers, which we are now extending for this new agentic era."
Khaleej Times
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