Visa will realize similar financial returns from stablecoins and agentic commerce as the card network reaps on its current services, CEO Ryan McInerney predicted Tuesday.
As these payment areas emerge, Visa aims to provide a critical “bridge layer” between real-world use cases and companies providing those services, the CEO said in remarks during the company’s quarterly earnings call.
The economics of using a Visa debit card to spend stablecoins from a digital wallet at a restaurant or grocery store will “look just like our normal product,” McInerney said in response to an analyst’s question about the expected “unit economics” for Visa on transactions driven by stablecoins and agentic commerce.
“By investing in building this hyperscaling bridge layer, we’re providing real-world utility for buyers and sellers, and we're doing that in the context of similar economics to what we deliver today,” he said Tuesday.
Visa is using its product unbundling strategy, which it calls “Visa-as-a-Service,” to address various technology needs that purveyors of blockchain, stablecoin and agentic commerce solutions may have.
The CEO said Visa’s value-added services business represents about 30% of total revenue. “These services have durable competitive advantages as the vast majority are linked to transactions, cards and accounts, and they are only strengthened with AI, reinforcing their importance as a growth lever for years to come,” McInerney said.
Beyond stablecoins, Visa is also betting that agentic commerce — an emerging retail shift in which consumer-directed robots make transactions on behalf of humans — will benefit the company with increased transaction volumes.
McInerney also predicted that agentic commerce will accelerate digitization of business-to-business payments, “where there is still enormous friction that AI agents can help remove.”
“They will be able to automate payment initiation directly from invoices and contracts and manage approvals autonomously,” he said. “In this context, virtual cards and tokenization will become a preferred way to pay and be paid.”
The company expects that cards will remain the preferred payment method for agentic commerce because of their attributes, including fraud protections, “know your customer” data, and loyalty program rewards, McInerney said.
McInerney said that “network security and trust” will become critical for agentic transactions.
San Francisco-based Visa processes about 300 billion annual transactions, or an average of 900 million daily, giving the company enormous data “to manage transaction risk, identity risk and fraud,” he said.
“Payment security is only going to become more difficult and more valued,” he said.
Visa, the largest U.S. card network, on Tuesday reported a 17% increase in net revenue for its fiscal second quarter – the biggest jump in four years – to $11.2 billion. The gain was driven by growth in payments and cross-border volumes along with transaction processing. Net income rose 32% to $6 billion.
Visa’s revenue boost was driven by strong payment volumes, solid pricing and value added services business, despite travel trend pressures in April, Wolfe Research analyst Darrin Peller said Tuesday in a client note.
In other news, McInerney announced that Wells Fargo plans to migrate to Visa’s Pismo cloud-based account ledger solution “as part of its core banking modernization over the coming years.” Visa completed its acquisition of São Paulo-based Pismo, which provides core banking and payment services via Amazon Web Services, in early 2024.
A Wells Fargo spokesperson declined to comment Tuesday on the agreement; a Pismo spokesperson said the company had no further details beyond McInerney’s remarks.
