Visa CEO Ryan McInerney expanded upon the card network's stablecoin strategy during the company's quarterly earnings call with investors Tuesday night, offering a more detailed look at how it's thinking about deploying the digital assets.
Visa has been testing stablecoins on Visa Direct, its instant payments scheme and remittance platform, and specifically looking at cross-border transactions where the settlement still has a delay.
Sending money from a Visa card to a bank account in an emerging market is one example of where the transaction may not be instant because of local banking infrastructure.
"We've been testing a series of corridors and putting stablecoins to work directly versus the fiat currency money movement options that we're able to deliver… and at this point, we've got a pretty good sense on each corridor we can provide faster money movement, cheaper money movement," McInerney said.
Visa in March laid out its
McInerney said that Visa was piloting with stablecoin payments companies specializing in emerging markets, such as stablecoin infrastructure company Yellow Card in sub-Saharan Africa, as it builds out its stablecoin treasury stack for settlement and money movement.
To that end Visa has been looking to expand the reach of its multi-chain stablecoin settlement capabilities on its network, and added a Euro-backed stablecoin, EURC and USDG and PYUSD.
"We are also adding support for two additional blockchains, Stellar and Avalanche, enabling us to support four stablecoins running on four unique blockchains representing two currencies that we can then accept and convert to over 25 traditional fiat currencies across the world," McInerney said.
Visa is also helping banks issue their own stablecoins and develop programmable money through its Tokenized Asset Platform, and sees an opportunity for stablecoin adoption to boost the digitization of consumer, small business and commercial payments in those emerging markets.
"So to the extent that stablecoins get adopted in a broad-based way by both consumers and businesses, and assuming that we are able to continue to have success with our playbook of making Visa cards the preferred way for people who have stablecoins in those markets to pay for things, I think that could accelerate our progress," McInerney said.
Outside of stablecoins, Visa's third fiscal quarter, which ended June 30, brought advances in revenue amid resilient consumer spending that remained consistent with past quarters, McInerney said.
Tariffs have had no meaningful impact, he said.
Revenue landed at $10.2 billion, an increase of 14% year over year and ahead of analysts' estimates of $9.8 billion, according to S&P CapitalIQ.
Net income hit $5.3 billion, or $2.69 per diluted share, an increase of 8% when compared to the same period last year. Analysts expected net income of $5.5 billion, or $2.80 per diluted share.
Payments volume and cross-border volume accelerated during the quarter, rising 8% and 12%, respectively, compared with the prior-year period. Processed transactions jumped 10% to 65.4 billion.
Revenues increased across the board during the quarter. Service revenue, which is based on payments volume from the
Expenses also increased 35% to $4 billion, largely driven by higher personnel costs and litigation expenses as the card network
