A Tencent Visa memorandum of understanding covers payments for travellers, remittances into Weixin Pay and purchases made by AI agents, Tencent said on October 29. Neither company gave launch dates or volumes.
For travellers to and from China, the two companies plan to build ways to pay at merchants on both the Weixin Pay and Visa networks, using TenPay Global, Tencent’s cross-border payment platform, and Visa Pay. They also plan to widen their remittance work through Visa Direct, so that more senders outside China can move money into Weixin Pay. Midas, Tencent’s international payments platform, already works with Visa on gaming payments, and that partnership now extends to Tencent’s overseas AI businesses. The two will also look at how Visa Intelligent Commerce could let AI agents find and buy goods for users. The background:
- October 13: the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) approved Visa Information Technology (Beijing) to begin preparing a domestic bank card clearing business
- 3 licensed card clearing institutions in China today: China UnionPay and the local entities of American Express and Mastercard
- 2019: international Visa cardholders first able to pay through WeChat Pay in China, according to CNBC
According to China Daily, the Visa subsidiary has one year to complete preparations before it can apply to start operations, and it then needs a licence approved by the PBOC and the National Financial Regulatory Administration. Until then it cannot issue Visa-branded renminbi cards in China.
Why it matters: Visa has cleared foreign-currency card payments in China for decades but has never cleared renminbi card payments between domestic parties. A wider partnership with the operator of Weixin Pay gives it a distribution partner for the day a domestic licence arrives, although the MoU lists areas to explore rather than products. The AI agent work is the newest part of the deal, and for now it covers Tencent’s businesses outside China.
Source: Tencent press release, October 29, 2026; CNBC, October 29, 2026; Visa press release, October 13, 2026; China Daily, October 13, 2026
Image: Shwangtianyuan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
