Trust and security have always underpinned payments, but they have become the decisive factors that determine whether a cardholder continues using a credential or pivots to another.
Amid instant decisions and real-time commerce, the moment a transaction is accepted or declined can either reinforce confidence or undermine it completely.
Jeffrey Chen, vice president of Digital Issuer Solutions Portfolio at Visa, learned that lesson firsthand. “Earlier this year, I was traveling to Italy with a new card. And I was declined at the point of purchase,” he told PYMNTS during the “Beyond the Card” series.
Chen understood why. He said the issuer’s fraud rules likely flagged the transaction as suspicious, outlining the logic as “Hey, you’re a consumer who normally lives in the U.S. Now I’m seeing a transaction over in Italy. Is this really you? I’m going to decline it.” But what happened next was the real breakdown.
“I didn’t get a push alert … I didn’t get any notification around why I was [being declined], and ultimately it meant that I switched to a different card,” Chen said. He called it a prime example of how “a moment that matters” can turn into a loyalty-eroding pain point when issuers fail to give consumers the information they need in real time.
The Optimal Experience: Resolve the Issue and Get Back to Spending
Chen said the goal is straightforward: make the moment that matters into a moment that reassures. The right experience would look very different than the friction-filled anecdote relayed above. Had he received a timely prompt explaining the reason for the decline, along with merchant and location information, he could have confirmed or rejected the transaction instantly. That type of orchestration — timely, contextualized, insightful — turns a negative moment into a positive one because the issuer looked out for the consumer and let them “get back to spending as quickly as possible,” Chen said.
Tokenization Keeps the Credential, and Trust, Intact
The same principles apply when a card must be reissued. If a card is lost, a cardholder wants more than a replacement card shipped overnight. They want uninterrupted spending.
Through tokenization and Visa’s orchestration layer, that is now possible. The payment network’s infrastructure and push provisioning mean that the token that was originally stored with mobile wallets can be mapped it over to the new PAN so that mobile wallet transactions will still work without interruption.
Controls and Proactive Prompts Strengthen the Consumer Relationship
Real-time cardholder controls extend this trust by letting users set budgets, spending preferences and thresholds. Far from introducing new risk, Chen said these controls reduce it by giving consumers proactive visibility: “The ability to facilitate that type of experience, notify the consumer proactively in a real time manner,” said Chen, “is transformative.”
It can also help deepen loyalty. Consumers want to know their issuer “understand[s] my goals… and [is] going to facilitate experiences that make it easier for me to meet those goals too.”
Agentic Commerce Raises the Stakes on Security and Control
Looking ahead, Chen said agentic commerce, where an artificial intelligence (AI) agent purchases on behalf of the consumer, highlights why trust and credential security must evolve rapidly. Consumers need confidence that agents will only act in line with their instructions.
Agentic commerce “has to be easy … it has to be secure”, says Chen. It also has to be transparent and consent-driven, meaning only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to use a payment credential.
Chen said the industry’s job is to meet consumers at the exact moment trust is tested — whether at a checkout in Italy, during a card replacement, or inside an AI-driven commerce flow. “As long as you’re doing it in a way,” said Chen, that winds up “putting the power back in the hands of consumers, then you have a fantastic outcome for all parties involved.”
