Visa Expands Money Movement as Card Spending Accelerates

Visa Direct transactions rose 21% to 4 billion, extending money movement beyond traditional card purchases. Nearly 60% of Visa’s global eCommerce transactions are now tokenized, giving the network an existing digital credential layer for new forms of commerce. Visa has more than 150 AI-powered applications and says agentic tools have cut feature-development time by more than 65%. Visa’s latest earnings call put two different versions of digital commerce on the same balance sheet. Version one: Consumers are still spending more on credit and debit cards. Version two: Consumers begin with AI agents and move through stablecoins, tokens and new money-movement channels. As for the card-based business, U.S. payments volume grew 10% year over year in the fiscal third quarter, with credit up 11% and debit up 9%. Visa Direct transactions, meanwhile, jumped 21%. But CEO Ryan McInerney spent a significant portion of Tuesday’s (July 28) call talking about how Visa expects the mechanics surrounding those transactions to change. “If stablecoins are reshaping the back end of commerce, we see AI as transforming the front end,” he told analysts. Visa, he added, believes agentic commerce will expand its addressable market. That front end is becoming an operating issue inside Visa as well as a product strategy. The company has deployed AI in engineering, client service and other functions, and is moving from AI assistance toward agents capable of performing tasks with human supervision. Product teams that previously had 10 or more people are being reorganized into agentic squads of two to four, according to management commentary on the call. The consumer-facing question is different: Can an AI agent be trusted to spend somebody else’s money? McInerney called agentic commerce a “when, not an if,” but said adoption will depend on consumers trusting that an agent is authorized, that a payment reflects their intent and that protections exist when something goes wrong. Visa is building agent scores, an agent directory and token-assurance infrastructure around that problem. The company’s broader digital product push extends beyond AI. Cybersource’s Unified Checkout, launched globally in March, is designed to orchestrate multiple payment types through a Visa-hosted experience and has been enabled by more than 4,500 sellers and acquirers. Visa is also combining DPS and Pismo capabilities into an integrated debit and credit issuer-processing product aimed at FinTechs and small to midsize banks. McInerney said in the Q&A that Pismo addresses banks’ efforts to move legacy technology to cloud and API-based architectures. Visa has taken Pismo into 19 new markets since acquiring it, while its U.S. strategy uses DPS and Pismo differently depending on issuer needs. CFO Chris Suh said U.S. payment volumes had reached a rate Visa had not seen since fiscal 2019 outside the post-pandemic recovery. Visa attributed the improvement to a combination of tax refunds, fuel prices, retail promotions, Visa Direct and FIFA-related spending. The trend had moderated somewhat by July 21. U.S. payments volume was running 9% higher, with both credit and debit up 9%. Cross-border volume excluding intra-Europe was up 14%, including an 18% increase in eCommerce and 12% increase in travel.