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Visa said on Thursday that it successfully completed hundreds of AI transactions as part of a pilot program that kicked off after the company’s product event in April.
The credit card issuer and rivals across the fintech industry are racing to build tools that allow consumers to task artificial intelligence agents with completing certain transactions.
“This is going to be the year we see an enormous amount of material adoption, and consumers really starting to get comfortable in a bunch of different agentic environments,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s head of growth products and partnerships, in an interview.
AI is transforming the e-commerce experience for shoppers, changing how customers purchase and browse for goods.
Mastercard said in April it was testing a feature called Agent Pay that allows AI agents to shop online for customers. Amazon began testing a “Buy For Me” offering that same month, while PayPal and Perplexity have joined forces on agentic shopping tools. Earlier in December, a survey from Visa found that nearly half of U.S. shoppers are using AI with purchases.
While the data is limited, Birwadker said the tools could be useful for consistent purchases made by consumers or events like concert tickets.
Visa said it plans to launch pilot programs in Asia and Europe next year, and is working with over 20 partners on AI agent tools.
Major US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is expanding payment options in Poland by integrating with one of the country’s most widely used mobile payment systems.
Coinbase has partnered with European payment processor PPro to enable payments via Blik, a popular Polish mobile payment network with nearly 20 million users.
The announcement was made by Coinbase executive and NFT Paris co-founder Côme Prost, who joined the exchange in February 2024 to lead its French operations.
“Improving local payment rails is a key focus for us,” Prost said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, highlighting the importance of simple, fast and familiar payment options in driving crypto adoption.
Coinbase holds MiCA licence as Poland struggles to pass crypto bill
Coinbase’s local expansion comes as Poland struggles to pass cryptocurrency legislation amid political divisions. Last week, the Polish government reintroduced an identical version of a strict crypto bill that had been vetoed by President Karol Nawrocki just weeks earlier.
Coinbase holds a license under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), which it secured in June.
“It has been a pleasure working with the team at Coinbase to launch Blik on their platform to enable Polish customers to access Crypto,” PPro executive Tom Benson wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday.
He added that he was confident the partnership with Coinbase would deepen in 2026 as the company adds more local payment methods and expands collaboration across additional areas.
Poland’s crypto adoption booming despite lagging local regulation
Crypto adoption in Poland has surged despite slow-moving local legislation, with the country emerging as one of the leaders in Chainalysis’ 2025 European Crypto Adoption report.
Poland is the only EU member state without a functioning national legal framework to enforce the MiCA regulation, even though the framework applies even without formal implementation.
Following the president’s veto of the government’s bill, Poland is indeed the only EU member state without any step toward implementation,” Juan Ignacio Ibañez, a member of the Technical Committee of the MiCA Crypto Alliance, told Cointelegraph recently.
Related: Coinbase adds stock trading, prediction markets in ‘everything app’ push
“Not every country has a single implementation law,” he added, pointing to Germany and France, which have specific laws, while other member states, such as Spain and Luxembourg, rely on amendments to existing financial legislation.
Ibañez noted, however, that a lag in implementation does not mean all countries are equally advanced, nor does it imply that Poland is more hostile to crypto. Hungary, for example, has implemented MiCA with additional regulations that are “more unfriendly to crypto asset service providers than Poland,” he added.
Meg O’Neill, chief executive officer of Woodside Energy Group Ltd., attends the company’s annual general meeting in Perth, Australia on Thursday, May 8, 2025. Photographer: Matt Jelonek/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
BP is changing its CEO again, but not its direction.
The appointment of Woodside Energy boss Meg O’Neill as its fourth new leader in six years suggests continuity, not course correction, after Murray Auchincloss’s tenure of less than two years.
I would suggest that Auchincloss didn’t necessarily do anything particularly that Meg O’Neill won’t be doing as well.
When I first met him in 2011, Auchincloss was chief of staff to Bob Dudley, BP’s immensely successful CEO who joined in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Dudley was replaced in early 2020 by Bernard Looney, who sought to transform the company into a green energy giant. Then, the company came under pressure from investors amid share price underperformance.
BP shares over the last five years
Looney left his role in 2023 following the revelation of undisclosed relationships with colleagues. Some people saw other contenders internally, because BP has always picked key people internally, up until this moment.
Other names were floated as contenders to lead the energy giant. Auchincloss was CFO when he stepped up to be CEO in January 2024. He was instrumental in reversing Looney’s strategy and focusing on the company’s core gas and oil units, and trying to get down some of the company’s enormous debt.
Carol Howle, BP’s executive vice president for supply, trading, and shipping, is to be interim CEO until O’Neill takes over on April 1. Auchincloss is set to remain until the end of 2026 in an advisory capacity. Many would suggest that a lot of the reasons why he’s stepping down are not necessarily his fault.
He was basically trying to redress a policy direction that shareholders ultimately decided was not the right way to go. This is about retrenchment. This is about Albert Manifold, the chair, saying, “right, we need someone to take us forward in the United States more aggressively, to get the debt down more aggressively, and to keep activist investors Elliott Management on board as well.”
Meg O’Neill is a US citizen. Is that going to help with exposure to the United States? At Woodside, she’s been very active in trying to increase their LNG assets and strategic purchases.
This appointment is about the speed of direction and perhaps the aggressiveness. It’s the public perception from some shareholders about Auchincloss as well.
I’ll be interested to see how Elliot moves forward. My understanding is that they’re actually very happy about the appointment. It’s fascinating to look at the share price performance over the last couple of years. It’s up 56% in five years — not bad, considering that during that period, we’ve seen low oil prices with the Brent price currently trading just around $60 a barrel.
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