Visa Announces New AI, Stablecoin and Token Innovations, Powering the Next Phase of Digital Commerce

07/29/2026

Visa, a global leader in digital payments, unveiled a suite of new AI, stablecoin, and tokenisation capabilities that signal a step change in how commerce is experienced and executed. Introduced at the Visa Payments Forum 2026, these innovations are designed to power a future where payments are not just digital but intelligent, programmable, and seamlessly embedded into everyday interactions. At the core is a clear ambition: to transform how trust, security, and control are delivered in an increasingly real-time, automated world.

This global announcement signals an evolution of Visa’s role, from enabling transactions to helping shape the underlying fabric of next-generation commerce. For markets such as Hong Kong, it demonstrates how Visa’s network and infrastructure can unlock new possibilities in AI-driven and digitally native payment experiences. As demand for faster, smarter, and more flexible forms of commerce accelerates, Visa is well positioned to work with issuers, merchants, and partners to bring these capabilities to life at scale.

Foundational shifts transforming digital commerce

At the Visa Payments Forum 2026, Jack Forestell, Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Visa, outlined how two foundational shifts—AI and stablecoins—are transforming both the front end and back end of money without compromising trust, security, or reliability.

“AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end,” said Forestell. “Visa’s role is to enable it to work securely, reliably and at global scale, for every participant in the ecosystem.”

Powering the front end of commerce with AI

AI is transforming how transactions are initiated, authorised, and trusted. Through Visa Intelligent Commerce—the company’s platform for agentic commerce—Visa provides the connectivity, trust, and secure controls needed for AI agents to autonomously transact on behalf of consumers and businesses. To power this ecosystem, Visa is collaborating across the industry to ensure all agent-initiated payments are seamless and verified, introducing:

Agent Score: Created with New Generation, it allows merchants to evaluate their websites for agentic commerce readiness—specifically, whether AI agents can navigate, understand and complete tasks on a merchant’s website.
Agentic Directory: To build mutual trust, merchants need to verify which AI agents can safely transact on their sites, and agents must be sure they are interacting with legitimate businesses. This directory lists only the agents and merchants verified by Visa as legitimate participants in agentic commerce.
OpenAI Partnership: A strategic collaboration enabling AI agents to initiate Visa payments within defined user permissions, with OpenAI providing the conversational interface and Visa delivering the underlying payment infrastructure.
Large Transaction Model: An AI model trained on billions of transactions to improve fraud detection while increasing authorisation performance and reducing false declines—a trade-off the industry has struggled with for years.

Visa also demonstrated early development concepts from its Crypto Labs and developer teams. This included a Command Line Interface proof of concept that lets AI agents pay for digital services directly in the terminal using Visa’s tokenised credentials.

Enhancing tokens for AI-driven commerce

Visa announced major enhancements to its tokenisation infrastructure, focusing on bringing richer data, context, and assurance into the credentials used across digital platforms. As commerce extends to autonomous channels, Visa is transforming tokens from static identifiers into intelligent credentials that allow trust and permissions to travel seamlessly with every transaction. This upgrade optimises ecosystem trust through two key advancements:

Enriched Data Context: Traditional tokens carry a secure data set built strictly for digital payments. Visa is enriching this data flow to embed deeper contextual details directly into the credential—including the specific transaction type, usage environment, and the identity of the payment initiator.
Token Assurance Signal: Token activity is dynamically evaluated throughout its entire lifecycle based on provisioning and behavioural history to generate a real-time signal of trust behind each transaction.

Together, these developments embed identity, permissions, and behavioural signals deeply into the payment credential. This provides issuers with stronger signals to optimise authorisation decisions, effectively reducing false declines for merchants while ensuring frictionless, secure experiences for consumers across all devices and AI-driven use cases.

Modernising the back end of money movement with stablecoins

Visa shared significant progress in modernising settlement and value transfer through stablecoins and blockchain-based infrastructure. To eliminate traditional back-end friction and accelerate global commerce, Visa is scaling the following core capabilities:

Tokenised Deposits: Visa announced it will build the technology layer that can allow banks to turn traditional deposits into programmable, always-on digital money. This gives banks a way to match the speed and flexibility of stablecoins while keeping funds on balance sheet.
Stablecoin Settlement: Visa is expanding stablecoin settlement pilots across multiple regions, blockchains and currencies. Building on its first stablecoin settlement pilots in early 2025, Visa has moved billions of dollars in stablecoins across VisaNet, with an annualised run rate of approximately USD7 billion (approximately HKD54.9 billion) as of March 2026. With issuing banks already settling seven days a week onchain with Visa, Visa is also working to extend seven-day settlement to include acquirers, increasing flexibility and frequency across the entire ecosystem.
Stablecoin-Linked Cards: Visa continues to expand stablecoin-linked card programs, enabling consumers and businesses to spend stablecoin balances anywhere Visa is accepted. With more than 160 programs live or in development globally, adoption is expected to accelerate.

Helping customers modernise without disruption

Across these innovations, Visa emphasised a consistent theme from clients: modernisation is essential, but full system replacement is not practical. Visa is addressing this with modular, cloud-native capabilities that integrate with existing infrastructure and enable banks, fintechs, acquirers and merchants to modernise at their own pace.

For issuers, the Pismo core banking platform enables flexible, real-time banking and processing capabilities with a phased path away from traditional systems.
For acquirers and merchants, Unified Checkout provides a consistent way to accept both card and non-card payments through a single orchestration layer—supporting evolving commerce models, including AI-driven transactions. Visa Intelligent Authorisation uses real-time network signals and advanced models to help acquirers and their merchants optimise authorisation approvals and capture incremental spend that might otherwise be declined.

Advancing Hong Kong’s readiness for the future of commerce

Visa has already begun laying the groundwork for the next phase of digital commerce in Hong Kong through local initiatives focused on ecosystem readiness and trusted innovation. This includes the launch of Visa Agentic Ready to support issuer readiness, as well as the completion of end-to-end AI agent-initiated card payment with the Bank of China (Hong Kong) as credit card issuer in testing. These local initiatives demonstrate how new payment innovations can be enhanced with transparency, strong authentication and issuer control, advancing Hong Kong’s readiness for the future of commerce.

About Visa

Visa (NYSE: V) is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere and see access as foundational to the future of money movement. Learn more at Visa.com.