Payments giant Visa is growing at its fastest rate in years, but it’s not because of some of its latest innovations in digital currencies and agentic AI.
Visa first started offering stablecoin settlements in 2023 and now has 130 stablecoin-linked card issuing programs across 40 countries. It’s also experimenting with agentic commerce, or allowing AI agents to make payments on their own.
Yet just $7 billion of annual settlements on Visa’s platform are made in cryptocurrencies, compared with $14 trillion overall.
“I’m hesitant to lean into the stablecoin and agentic commerce narratives too much,” Chris Suh, Visa’s chief financial officer, tells Fortune. “If you look at our business today, the vast majority of it has nothing to do with those things.”
Visa reported net revenue of $11.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 17% year-on-year. That marks the fastest growth for the company since 2022.
“Our momentum in consumer, commercial and money movement is clearly strong and will strengthen with agentic commerce and stablecoins,” said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney during the Q2 earnings call. “In many countries around the world, especially in emerging markets, consumers and businesses are increasingly using stablecoins as a store of value…we are providing on-ramps and off-ramps with stablecoin-linked Visa cards.”
Suh attributes Visa’s growth largely to the “mature fiat world” it has long operated in, pointing to jumps in payments volume, cross-border payments and processed transactions, rather than its newer initiatives like stablecoins and agentic commerce. (In Q2, global payments volume was up 9%, cross-border volume was up 11% and total processed transactions grew 9%.)
“The state of our businesses in cross-border, domestic, debit and credit is incredibly good across all regions,” Suh says. “Agentic commerce and stablecoins are businesses Visa doesn’t monetize very well today, and that could be brand new TAM for us to go after.”
Suh’s caution on stablecoins and AI constrasts with the more optimistic view from other Visa executives. Stephen Karpin, Visa’s Asia-Pacific head, previously framed stablecoins as a key part of the company’s strategy. “We want to make [stablecoins] one of the options to make and receive payments all around the world, when the regulatory environment is ready,” he said to Fortune in November. “We’ve got some assets in the form of technology and capability, and want to help businesses large and small start conducting commerce in Web3.”
Visa first unveiled its AI-powered commerce push in April 2025, rolling out Visa Intelligent Commerce, which allowed AI agents to shop and pay on a user’s behalf. By late 2025, it had expanded its agentic commerce pilots to Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
“One of the things missing from the current state of a LLM-powered chatbot is the ability to make payment via an agent,” Karpin said last year during Visa’s APAC launch of Intelligent Commerce.
Asia as ‘test bed’
Asia is one of Visa’s fastest-growing regions, contributing around 14% of payments volume on Visa’s platforms, up 6.5% year-on-year. Yet Suh adds that the region also serves as a lab for Visa’s latest products. Asia has “different flavors of growth,” combining emerging and mature markets.
“Japan, for example, is a very unique market for us,” Suh says. “It has a bigger cash percentage than any other tier one economy in the world, and that’s an interesting landscape to operate in.”
He adds that Asia is the source of much of the innovation around payments. “We see more digital wallets per capita in this region than anywhere else in the world,” Suh says.
In 2023, Visa launched its Visa Flex Credential, with local issuer Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company. The technology allows users to consolidate up to five cards into a single credential; Visa later expanded the service to North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
“We’ve invested significantly in Asia—our employees are local, our clients are local,” Suh says. “When we bring solutions to market, they’re very customized to the markets we operate in.”
As for the future of Visa’s bets on stablecoins and agentic commerce, Suh remains positive that they’ll pay off eventually–even if they don’t in the next few quarters. “Both agentic commerce and stablecoins are important investments that today don’t have immediate ROI,” he says.
“They won’t pay off in the next six months, but could over the next six years.”
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