Visa debuts AI-based financial advice

• Key insight: Visa has introduced an AI-powered financial assistant targeted at bank clients.
• What's at stake: Banks are investing in AI, with customer experience being a primary strategy, and to date, Visa has not been part of this. 
• Forward look: The card network will add more functions in the coming months. 

With banks considering how to use new forms of artificial intelligence, a competition is emerging among payment firms that are selling services designed to make AI easier to deploy and use.

Visa on Tuesday launched AI Financial Assistant, which the card network says brings "conversational financial guidance" into banking apps. Visa hopes its massive payment network generates enough data to keep card issuers—and consumers—from using third-party AI programs to guide budgeting and other spending decisions. 

"We have data across [267 billion] yearly transactions. You can't underestimate the foundation of that and the trust that consumers have with their financial institution," Michele Herron, senior vice president and head of North America Value Added Services at Visa, told American Banker. 

A prompt move

Visa's financial assistant is a feature of the card network's Digital Issuer Solutions, and includes a chatbot banks could embed in their mobile apps. Banks can connect their FAQs and documents to surface banking product information. For example, a query such as "are there any car loan benefits for existing customers?" or "do you have high-yield savings accounts to help me save for a car?" will result in recommendations based on a specific consumer's profile, past transactions, relationships with the bank through a permisioned link between Visa and the bank, and data from similar peers. The AI model will use the consumer's payment data—on an opt-in basis, combined with analysis of other payment data.

"If you have eight streaming services and aren't using all of them, [the bot might generate] a recommendation to cancel," Herron said. 

While the financial assistant is focused on advice at launch, future iterations of the product will include more actionable features, such as automatically executing transactions under certain conditions, such as canceling the aforementioned streaming services. 

Visa is using its own data on Visa-branded card transactions and AI platform (DAP), which provides secure access to multiple AI models, which the company evaluates to vet security, accuracy, compliance and performance.

 By combining Visa's data with existing banking apps, the card brand hopes to simplify prompting, or the complexity and number of questions that a user has to enter to produce a response from the AI program. 

"That data is pivotal," Herron said, adding the goal is to produce actionable answers in a question or two, as opposed to six or seven. "There's a hurdle to going outside to a third party AI program." 

Visa supported its rollout by citing data from Credit Karma that reports 66% of Americans who have used generative AI are using AI for financial advice; and Oliver Wyman research that found 85% of consumers are willing to share financial data with banks if there is a clear AI-related value proposition.

"Consumers are already turning to AI for financial advice," Herron said. 

Urgency for AI?

Visa's release follows other investments Visa and Mastercard have made to build agentic AI products for their value-added services strategies. Mastercard's products, for example, include an agentic AI engine designed to make it easier for clients to onboard customers. 

Banks, the primary target market for Visa's financial assistant, are also weighing how to responsibly use new forms of AI. Citi is among those banks, using Mastercard's Agent Pay to manage risk for AI-driven payments. Enhancing customer experience is a key driver of AI strategies at banks. Fifty three percent of national banks list customer experience as a strategic rationale for investing in AI, according to research from American Banker. 

Analysts say Visa is well-positioned to compete in AI. 

"Visa's [merchant and issuer scale] in a world of more interconnected consumer commerce, AI, and money movement outweigh competitive worries," analysts at William Blair said in a research note. "Management argued that agentic commerce will accelerate global commerce digitization, creating opportunities similar to debit, transit, and vending."In a research note, Morgan Stanley said Visa and Mastercard can benefit from the agentic AI wave. "We also expect Mastercard and Visa to be prime beneficiaries through an expansion of value-added services as security, authentication, and fraud tooling become even more important."