Key facts
- Visa has processed $7 billion annually in stablecoins through its network.
- The company is expanding stablecoin settlement pilots and introducing tokenized deposits.
- Visa is partnering with OpenAI to enable payments initiated by AI agents.
- New AI initiatives aim to improve fraud detection and authorization performance.
- Visa's strategy supports 'agentic commerce,' where AI agents autonomously initiate transactions.
Visa is significantly advancing its capabilities in stablecoin settlements, tokenization, and artificial intelligence to support the emerging landscape of "agentic commerce." At its annual payments forum, the company highlighted its strategic initiatives, positioning stablecoins as a key component of the back end of global payments infrastructure, while AI transforms the front end.
Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, emphasized the company's role in ensuring these technologies operate securely and reliably at a global scale. Visa is expanding its stablecoin settlement pilots across various regions, blockchains, and currencies, having already processed billions of dollars in stablecoins through VisaNet, with an annualized run rate reaching $7 billion as of March 2026. The company is also working to extend seven-day settlement to include acquirers, enhancing flexibility across the ecosystem.
On the tokenization front, Visa is developing technology for tokenized deposits, allowing banks to convert traditional deposits into programmable digital money. The company is also enriching token data to provide more detailed transaction insights and a trust score for each tokenized transaction, which aims to strengthen authorization decisions and reduce false declines.
These efforts are part of Visa's broader strategy to address the structural shift towards agentic commerce, where AI agents autonomously initiate transactions. To facilitate this, Visa has introduced Agent Score for merchants to evaluate AI agents and Agentic Directory, a verified registry of approved agents and merchants. Additionally, the Large Transaction Model, an AI model trained on billions of transactions, is designed to improve fraud detection and authorization performance.
In a significant move, Visa has partnered with OpenAI to enable Visa payments within agentic commerce environments. This collaboration will allow developers and merchants to accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents, subject to user-defined controls such as spending limits and merchant restrictions. Payments will leverage tokenized Visa credentials with real-time authorization and fraud monitoring.