Virtual cards are proactively provisioned for online purchases. Merchant transactions or user browser actions can be analyzed for the existence of a trigger condition such as recurrent merchant transactions or registration on a merchant website, among other things. In response to detecting the trigger condition, a request is sent to a customer for permission to add a virtual card for payment of a merchant online. Subsequently, a request is submitted for the virtual card for the customer from a financial institution in response to permission being granted, where the virtual card is linked to an account of the customer at the financial institution. A browser script can next be executed that adds the virtual card as the primary payment method of a website of the merchant.