- Key insights: Visa in the past week has entered collaborations with AI-focused and stablecoin payment technology firms.
- What's at stake: The partnerships are designed to boost the card network's value-added services, a key part of earnings that investors watch closely.
- Forward look: Visa is attempting to build a market for agentic commerce and digital assets, two areas with a lot of interest but not much usage.
With the
"Investors will begin viewing VAS at Visa on the front foot, offering solutions to open closed networks, secure agentic transactions, support open banking, and enable fintech product road maps," William Blair analysts said in a research note on Visa, adding VAS is a "tailwind" that supports an outlook for steady yield accretion at Visa.
AI and digital assets
Visa's partnership strategy is based on the idea that the future of commerce will be built across an ecosystem, and Visa's role is to enable it, according to Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth products and partnerships at Visa. "We are opening our network so developers, fintechs, and enterprises can build new payment and money movement solutions on top of Visa's infrastructure," Birwadker told American Banker. "That approach is reflected in recent collaborations like Alchemy where we are enabling AI-driven commerce by helping developers bring agent-based payments to market."
What's changed over the past year is the pace and depth of these partnerships, Birwadker said, adding the technology is advancing from experimentation to real-world uses. "[That supports] both emerging models like agent-initiated transactions and scaled use cases like faster cross-border payouts," Birwadker said.
Visa's new partnerships forged in the past week include a collaboration with Alchemy, an AI developer, which has added Alchemy's AgentCard to Visa's Intelligent Commerce AI portal. AgentCard enables AI agents to create an identity to make online purchases on behalf of human consumers. Alchemy contends AI is moving faster than general corporate technology.
"Banks are designed for humans. They can proactively go to a website, access the bank, and get a card," Nikil Viswanathan, CEO of Alchemy, told American Banker. "Now we're seeing this wave of [AI] agents that can't easily use the infrastructure that was built for humans."
By using AgentCard, an AI agent built on models from OpenAI, Anthropic or "other models" can book a vacation, order food, renew subscriptions or perform similar tasks on behalf of a human — without that person engaging with a checkout screen.
Alchemy's partnership with Visa includes a digital card designed for AI agents, with Viswanathan saying the card had 78,000 sign-ups in its first 48 hours. While that's less than a fraction of the billions of credit cards in circulation, Viswanathan contends "there aren't many people who have an AI agent yet, so there is demand."
AgentCard is accessible through an application programming interface and includes a Visa payment token, distinct email address, phone number and a crypto wallet.
"The whole KYC [money laundering risk] marketplace doesn't work for an AI agent, so it's difficult for [AI agents] to use a bank's website," Viswanathan said. "There's a need for a bridge between credit cards and agents."
In another partnership, the Visa Direct real-time transfer system added support for Nuvion, an AI-powered global banking and cross-border payments platform. The integration is designed to reduce the complexity of international payments, improve treasury management and access faster, more reliable cross-border money movement.
By combining Visa Direct's with Nuvion's AI, businesses automatically facilitate payments through options such as cards, multicurrency accounts, foreign exchange services, and stablecoin settlement rails.
And in a collaboration less directly related to AI, Visa has partnered with Norwegian fintech Opera's stablecoin wallet MiniPay to launch a card that can be used to spend stablecoin balances at more than 175 million merchants.
"MiniPay was built to make stablecoins useful in everyday life, not just to hold or send, but to spend," said Jørgen Arnesen, executive vice president of mobile at Opera, in a release.
Collaborating
The new partnerships follow earlier Visa moves to build a foundation for agentic commerce and digital assets. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol is a framework to recognize trusted AI agents, distinguish those agents from rogue agents and guide communication. The card network's partners for Agent Protocol include Adyen, Ant, Checkout.com, Coinbase, Elavon, CyberSource, Fiserv, Microsoft, Nuvei, Shopify, Stripe and Worldpay.
Rival Mastercard's agentic AI services include Merchant Cloud, which enables merchants to conduct agentic payments, integrating with Mastercard Agent Pay. Other cloud-enabled services include fraud monitoring tools to spot fake merchants, providing risk scores to merchant acquirers and payment companies.
"Visa and Mastercard continue to pair durable core payments growth with meaningful VAS contribution," analysts at TD Cowen said in a research report, noting both card networks reported more than 20% year over year VAS growth in their most recent quarter. "Visible investments in agentic commerce and stablecoin-enabled solutions are also evident and positioning these as complementary infrastructure layers that can expand the long‑term addressable market."
