Tencent and Visa Announce Strategic Partnership to Enhance Global Payment and Commerce Experiences Across Tencent’s Ecosystem

Tencent and Visa have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore broader collaboration aimed at enhancing global payment and commerce experiences across Tencent’s ecosystem. The MoU sets out a comprehensive framework for collaboration across cross-border payments, agentic commerce, enterprise AI and support for global business expansion, bringing together Tencent’s payment solutions, digital platforms and technology capabilities with Visa’s global network and cross-border money movement solutions.

Building on their existing collaboration serving international visitors to China, Tencent and Visa aim to make cross-border payments easier for both inbound and outbound travelers through TenPay Global, Tencent’s cross-border payment platform, and Visa Pay. For travelers to and from China, the collaboration will focus on developing solutions to enable cross-border payments at participating merchants on the Weixin Pay and Visa networks, in line with applicable regulatory requirements. The companies also plan to deepen their cross-border remittance collaboration through Visa Direct, making it easier for more overseas senders to transfer funds into the Weixin Pay ecosystem.

Visa and Tencent will explore how emerging technologies, including AI and agentic capabilities, can support more seamless and secure digital commerce experiences, while maintaining trust, security and consumer control, subject to applicable regulatory, data-governance and security requirements.

Tencent’s international payments platform, Midas, and Visa have leveraged their long-standing gaming partnership to build deep cooperation in joint marketing, global payments and money movement, and risk management. The partnership now extends to Tencent’s overseas AI businesses, optimizing AI payment experiences and exploring agentic payment opportunities.

Tencent and Visa will also explore next-generation agentic payments, including how Visa Intelligent Commerce could support secure, consumer-controlled experiences in which AI agents help eligible users discover, select and purchase goods or services, and collaborate in areas such as developer-agent payment experiences and emerging AI-native commerce models.

“Our expanded partnership with Visa builds on our ongoing efforts to better serve users and businesses across Tencent’s ecosystem. By making cross-border payments more convenient and exploring how Tencent Cloud’s AI and agent capabilities can complement Visa’s global network and expertise, we hope to create more seamless commerce experiences for consumers and new opportunities for businesses, both in China and internationally,” said Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and CEO of its Cloud and Smart Industries Group.

“As two-way travel and commerce between China and the rest of the world continue to grow, we are pleased to build on our existing partnership with Visa to deepen cross-border payment connectivity and explore new possibilities in AI-powered agentic payments,” said Forest Lin , Corporate Vice President of Tencent and Head of Tencent Financial Technology.

“The next chapter of commerce will be shaped by increasingly connected digital ecosystems and new AI-powered experiences. Our partnership with Tencent gives us an opportunity to help connect those experiences to Visa’s global network, opening more ways for consumers to pay and businesses to participate in global commerce, with trust and consumer control at the heart of how we innovate,” said Elaine Chang, Group General Manager, Greater China, Visa.