Visa Chief Executive Ryan McInerney landed $31.56 million in compensation last year, receiving a 21% raise over the prior year as the card network giant boosted revenue and faced down challenges and competition.
It was the highest amount ever paid to a CEO at the company, based on recent past proxy statements. McInerney's CEO predecessor, Al Kelly, earned $30.9 million in fiscal 2021. The company reported McInerney’s “compensation actually paid” amount, based on certain reporting requirements, as $55.8 million.
McInerney earned a $1.5 million salary, but collected much more in equity: $18.72 million in stock awards and $5.69 million in stock options, according to the San Francisco-based company’s proxy filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received $5.25 million in non-equity incentive compensation and $373,431 in other pay, and benefited from $20,632 in additional pension and deferred compensation for Visa’s 2025 fiscal year.
The CEO’s raise on the $26 million he received the prior year came as Visa’s revenue for the year ended Sept. 30, rose 11% to $40 billion and net income inched up 2% to $20.1 billion, or 11% to $22.5 billion on an adjusted basis, the filing said. Payments volume flowing over Visa’s network increased 8% to $14.2 trillion.
Most of Visa’s approximately 34,000 employees earned far less than McInerney, with his compensation for the year being 204 times the $154,909 median pay level of the workforce, according to the company’s proxy disclosure.
Visa benefited from resilient consumer spending this year, despite inflation and rising job losses that tend to curtail consumer outlays. The company has also reaped rewards from a consumer and corporate transition away from cash and check payments to card payments and digital payments. It’s also increasingly providing related consulting, cybersecurity and other services to its commercial clients to bolster revenue, with an expectation of benefiting from artificial intelligence too.
“We are witnessing a powerful convergence of technology trends: the rise of AI-driven commerce, the broad adoption of tokenized payments and data, the growing role of stablecoins and the digitization of identity,” McInerney said in an annual report letter issued this month. “This isn’t an incremental change; it’s a fundamental rewiring of how money moves around the world.”
No doubt the Visa network is powerful, with some 12 billion endpoints used by billions of people at 175 million worldwide merchant locations and about 14,500 financial institutions, making it the largest in the U.S. and one of the biggest in the world. The company leans on that infrastructure scale and existing connections to set it apart.
But competition has been steadily mounting in the market over the past decade. The company is battling a growing swarm of tech titans, fintech startups and cryptocurrency companies all seeking to shift payments to digital tools that don’t necessarily include cards. They include rivals like Google, PayPal Holdings, Block, Circle Internet Group and Klarna Group.
With the signing of the Genius Act this year, Visa will also confront more competition from stablecoin providers, both in e-commerce and cross-border payments. In addition, it’s beginning to do battle with companies seeking to make payments in the evolving agentic commerce sphere.
While Visa has been innovating to harness new digital tools, such as virtual cards, tap technology, tokenization and embedded finance, segueing into new payments arenas, it may be ceding some ground to competitors, and losing relative market value as a result.
While Visa shares rose about 25% during its fiscal year, investors appear somewhat worried. Visa’s 2025 annual report showed the company’s stock returns outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the S&P Financials Index over the past ten years, but underperformed them in the past five years.
Visa’s stock slipped in the past six months, declining about 10%, despite efforts by McInerney to call attention to Visa’s efforts to squeeze more profitability out of the use of artificial intelligence.
Visa has also faced significant ongoing litigation this year in the form of a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit over its debit card practices and 20-year-old litigation over what some merchants assert were excessive interchange fees charged for consumers’ credit card transactions. A settlement was reached in the merchant matter last month, but a federal judge has yet to approve that pact with merchants.
The company’s annual meeting, where shareholders vote on compensation and other issues, will be held virtually on January 27. Votes on compensation, and shareholder proposals, are essentially a formality, with tallied totals almost always supporting the company’s stances.
