Visa’s Quiet Bet on Tokens, Stablecoins and “Agentic” Commerce Powers a Strong Quarter

A resilient top line meets a shifting revenue mix

Visa began fiscal 2026 with the sort of numbers that reassure long‑term shareholders. Net revenue rose 15 per cent year on year to $10.9bn, while earnings per share climbed in tandem, up 15 per cent to $3.17. Underneath those headline figures, however, the company is increasingly being pulled by currents that look less like a traditional card network and more like a payments “hyperscaler”.

Core activity remains solid. Global payments volume grew 8 per cent in constant dollars to nearly $4tn and processed transactions reached 69bn, up 9 per cent. Cross‑border volume excluding intra‑Europe – a high‑yield engine of the model – grew 11 per cent, with travel up 10 per cent and cross‑border e‑commerce 12 per cent despite softer crypto‑related purchases.

Yet the real story of the quarter lay in the composition of growth. Value‑added services (VAS) and commercial and money‑movement solutions (CMS) did the heavy lifting, and together are increasingly defining Visa’s growth identity.

VAS revenue surged 28 per cent in constant dollars to $3.2bn, contributing roughly half of total revenue growth. The outperformance was broad‑based, spanning issuing solutions, acceptance, risk and advisory work, and was amplified by demand for marketing and sponsorship‑linked services ahead of this year’s FIFA World Cup and Olympics.

CMS revenue grew 20 per cent in constant currency, as commercial payment volume rose 10 per cent and Visa Direct transactions jumped 23 per cent to 3.7bn, with strength in both domestic and cross‑border flows. That commercial line is now expanding faster than Visa’s overall payments volume, helped by wins such as JPMorgan’s Sapphire Reserve for Business and Trip.com’s virtual card programme.

International transaction revenue was the soft spot, up just 6 per cent, held back by unusually low FX volatility and a growing mix of lower‑yield but still profitable Visa Direct cross‑border flows. Management is now assuming that this low volatility persists, effectively building a drag into the rest of the year even as the operating business runs ahead of plan.

Guidance for the full year remains intact: low‑double‑digit adjusted net revenue growth and low‑double‑digit operating expense growth in constant currency. The tax rate is now expected to be slightly lower, at 18–18.5 per cent, nudging EPS growth to the higher end of low double digits.

Tokens, tap‑to‑pay and the reinvention of the credential

On the surface, Visa still talks about “credentials” – the 5bn‑plus Visa cards and digital identities in circulation. But the contours of that credential are being redrawn at pace.

Tap‑to‑pay penetration has now exceeded 80 per cent of all face‑to‑face Visa transactions globally, with the US approaching 70 per cent. Transit systems remain a powerful on‑ramp: San Francisco and more than ten other systems came online this quarter, continuing a pattern where public transport catalyses contactless behaviour.

Visa’s “tap to phone” technology – effectively turning smartphones into acceptance devices – has pushed the number of global acceptance locations above 175m. Over the past year, that capability has doubled its transaction count and expanded into more than 20 additional markets, incrementally chipping away at cash and helping small merchants on‑board more easily.

The more radical shift, however, is digital. Visa now counts over 17.5bn tokens in circulation – more than triple the number of physical cards. Tokenization, once an esoteric back‑office concept, has become central to the economics of digital commerce. By replacing primary account numbers with dynamic, device‑bound tokens, Visa has been able to improve authorization rates and reduce fraud, and thereby win influence in a world increasingly mediated by wallets and platforms.

The company has also been quietly eroding the friction of online checkout. In 2019, roughly 44 per cent of Visa e‑commerce transactions were “guest” checkouts, requiring consumers to re‑enter card details. That figure is now down to about 16 per cent, and among Visa’s top 25 merchants it is below 4 per cent. In practical terms, 96 per cent of transactions at those big sellers can now be completed with a click or biometric authentication.

This matters for investors because it underpins pricing power and stickiness. A retailer that sees measurable uplift in conversion and lower fraud from tokens and click‑to‑pay is less likely to compete purely on interchange and network fees; the conversation shifts to revenue enablement.

Geographically, Visa is still mid‑journey. Issuer token enrolment efforts are under way across Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The company is also working with acquirers and payment facilitators globally to further reduce residual guest checkout, particularly for merchants with large stored‑credential files.

From Flex to “agentic” commerce: building the next rails

On top of this digital credential layer, Visa is layering newer constructs that speak to where commerce might be heading rather than where it is today.

The Visa Flex credential – a multi‑funding “Swiss army knife” – remains small at roughly 20m credentials globally but is growing quickly. It allows a single credential to pull from debit, credit, multi‑currency accounts, rewards balances or instalment plans. That modularity is appealing both to traditional banks such as SMCC in Japan, which can bundle multiple propositions into one card, and to fintechs and buy‑now‑pay‑later players such as Affirm, Klarna and now Block’s Cash App. For the latter, a Flex‑powered Visa card effectively turns BNPL from a merchant‑by‑merchant integration slog into an anywhere‑Visa‑is‑accepted proposition.

More speculative, but potentially more far‑reaching, is “agentic” commerce – Visa’s term for AI‑driven agents that can initiate and complete payments on behalf of users. Here, tokens again sit at the core. The Visa Intelligent Commerce platform uses tokens as configurable building blocks for automated workflows, whether that is a travel itinerary, a recurring property management fee or a corporate bill‑pay routine.

The company says it is working with more than 100 partners globally on these agentic capabilities, with over 30 building in its sandbox and multiple agents already live. Recent examples include:

• A B2B agentic payments tie‑up with Ramp to automate corporate bill payments and optimise working capital.
• Integration with ALDAR in CEMEA to streamline recurring property service charges through its Live Alder app.
• An agreement with Amazon Web Services to list Visa Intelligent Commerce on the AWS Marketplace, offering blueprints for agentic workflows such as travel bookings and retail purchases.

Crucially, Visa is trying to shape the rules of engagement for these autonomous agents. Its “trusted agent” protocol sets out the connectivity and data elements required for secure agentic transactions and is being tied into partnerships with Cloudflare and Akamai, both of which sit in front of millions of merchant websites, including nine of the world’s ten largest retailers. At the same time, Visa is building interoperability with Google’s emerging universal commerce protocol, hedging against fragmentation in standards.

Agentic solutions are now live in the US and CEMEA, with pilots starting in Asia Pacific and Europe and token enrolment in LAC. This is still early‑stage, but for investors it offers a glimpse of how Visa aims to remain the transaction backbone even as AI agents, not consumers, press the “buy” button.

Stablecoins: additive flows rather than existential threat

Nowhere is the tension between disruption and enablement clearer than in stablecoins. Visa describes the segment as having “tremendous growth and disruption potential” yet still being in the early innings for real payments use‑cases. Its answer is not to fight the trend but to sit in the connective tissue between fiat and on‑chain value.

Stablecoin‑linked card issuance has now been extended to more than 50 countries, allowing consumers and businesses to spend stablecoins anywhere Visa is accepted, with off‑ramping handled under the hood. On the other side of the ledger, stablecoin settlement using USDC has been expanded into the US, giving banks and fintechs seven‑day‑a‑week settlement, including weekends when correspondent banking rails are shut.

That stablecoin settlement activity has reached a $4.6bn annualised run‑rate – still small relative to Visa’s total settlement flows but growing rapidly. The company is leaning into advisory work too, launching a global stablecoins advisory practice to help financial institutions, merchants and platforms shape their strategies, offering training, market entry planning and technology enablement.

Visa is also aligning with emerging base‑layer projects, serving as a design partner to the Tempo Layer 1 initiative and participating in the testnet for Circle’s ARC blockchain. The plan is to support both transaction processing and value‑added services on these rails. In parallel, it is piloting Visa Direct stablecoin payouts in the US, letting platforms and employers send funds directly to recipients’ stablecoin wallets – a pitch that resonates in markets with currency volatility or limited banking access.

Management is notably clear about where stablecoins do not yet fit. In developed digital payment markets such as the US or Western Europe, where consumers already have easy access to “digital dollars” via bank accounts and wallets, Visa does not see compelling product‑market fit for everyday stablecoin spending. The more immediate TAM lies in cross‑border flows, remittances, B2B and B2C disbursements, and in high‑inflation or capital‑controlled economies.

Under the hood: processing, risk and the economics of scale

Visa’s push “down stack” into issuer processing continues to gather momentum. Its long‑standing DPS business in US debit has been augmented by the acquisition of Pismo, a cloud‑native issuer processing and core banking platform. The logic is straightforward: most banks want to modernise from on‑premise cores to the cloud, but face complex decisions and long project cycles.

Pismo’s first notable commercial win since the acquisition is with Banco Bice in Chile, where, together with expense management firm Mendel, Visa will run a corporate issuer processing programme targeting large and mid‑market B2B clients. In New Zealand, Finance Now has become Pismo’s first fleet card customer, combining issuer processing with Visa’s tokenisation and risk services.

The attraction for fintechs is slightly different. Many have grown domestically but struggle to find technology partners capable of supporting multi‑country expansion. A cloud‑native stack that covers debit, credit, commercial products and current accounts offers a way to scale across borders – and, from Visa’s perspective, a way to ensure that new‑economy players carry Visa credentials as they expand.

On the risk side, Visa is marshalling its AI assets to defend both its own network and adjacent bank and account‑to‑account flows. FeatureSpace, acquired just over a year ago, is now being deployed as a “before, during and after” fraud prevention platform. Nets, part of Nexi Group, will use it to protect 150 banks across Nordic and Central Europe, harnessing cloud delivery and advanced models.

Visa Account Attack Intelligence, designed to detect enumeration attacks on e‑commerce credentials, has now scored more than 60bn transactions in the US and flagged about 600m suspicious ones over the past year. In Latin America, around 90 per cent of clients have activated the tool within six months, helping to prevent over $10bn of fraud.

At the network level, Visa Advanced Authorization – which is network‑agnostic – has won the mandate from Morocco’s national switch, Switch Elmarib, to score all domestic transactions. Meanwhile, Visa Protect for account‑to‑account payments has been rolled out in two more countries, with several more in the pipeline, giving the company an expanding role in non‑card rails.

These efforts are not simply defensive; they underpin the 28 per cent growth in value‑added services and support management’s narrative that Visa is as much a risk‑tech and advisory platform as it is a card network.

Macro, regulation and the outlook for investors

On the macro front, Visa is not building a downturn into its base case. Management assumes the current environment persists, with resilient consumer spending. Within the US, payment volume grew 7 per cent, with e‑commerce still outpacing face‑to‑face. Credit and debit grew 7 per cent and 6 per cent respectively, and there was no notable deterioration in lower‑spend bands; affluent consumers continue to grow faster but not at the expense of the mass market.

Some US debit slowdown late in the quarter was idiosyncratic, driven by a Visa Direct client insourcing its volume, the migration of certain Capital One debit volumes and adverse weather. Internationally, payments volume rose 9 per cent, with Europe stable, CEMEA still one of the fastest‑growing regions despite some promotional campaign timing effects, and Asia‑Pacific modestly softer due to tax payment timing.

Regulatory risk remains a simmering undercurrent, particularly in the US, where the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) could, if enacted, force more open routing and compress economics. Visa’s public stance remains that the proposal is “very harmful and simply not needed”, pointing to an already intense competitive landscape that now includes wallets, account‑to‑account payments, BNPL providers, and crypto‑adjacent players. Management is heavily engaged on Capitol Hill, stressing potential negative impacts on credit access, rewards, security and innovation.

For investors, the quarter underlines three themes. First, Visa’s core cash‑generating engine – consumer payments and cross‑border – remains robust, even as FX volatility temporarily crimps one revenue line. Second, the growth story is increasingly anchored in software‑like services: advisory, fraud, data, tokenization, issuer processing and marketing. These businesses are growing at mid‑20s to high‑20s rates and carry the promise of higher structural margins and deeper client entanglement.

Third, the company is positioning itself as an infrastructure provider to emerging payment paradigms – stablecoins, AI agents, account‑to‑account flows – rather than betting on any single front‑end winner. That may not produce dramatic inflection points quarter to quarter, but it offers a kind of quiet optionality embedded in the balance sheet.

With $3.8bn of buybacks, $1.3bn of dividends, and a further $21.1bn authorised for repurchases in the quarter, Visa continues to recycle its cash flow back to shareholders even as it funds acquisitions and product development. For a network built in the era of plastic, it is increasingly the intangible layers – code, data and protocols – that are driving its next phase of growth.