Visa put stablecoins and AI at the centre of global payments infrastructure at its annual payments forum, unveiling new strategies in settlement, tokenisation and AI.

According to a recent report by The Block, Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell (잭 포레스텔) said in a keynote speech that "AI is changing the front end of commerce, and stablecoins are changing the back end." He emphasised that Visa's role is to make them work safely and reliably at global scale.

Visa is expanding pilot projects for stablecoin settlement across multiple regions, blockchains and currencies. It said it has moved billions of dollars worth of stablecoins through VisaNet, with an annualised run rate of $7 billion as of March 2026.

According to Visa, issuing banks that provide cards are already conducting on-chain settlement 7 days a week, including weekends. Visa plans to extend 7-day settlement to acquirers that process merchant transactions.

In tokenisation, Visa is building tokenised deposit technology that allows banks to convert existing deposits into programmable digital currency while keeping funds on their balance sheets. It is also adding token assurance signals that generate a trust score for each transaction to support issuer approval decisions and reduce false declines for merchants.

Visa is also responding actively to "agentic commerce," in which AI agents initiate transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses.

Visa introduced Agent Score, which evaluates whether an AI agent can complete tasks on a merchant website, and Agentic Directory, a registry of verified agents and merchants. It also unveiled a Large Transaction Model, an AI model trained on billions of transactions, to improve fraud detection and reduce false declines.

Visa is also working with OpenAI to support Visa payments in an agentic commerce environment.

The focus is on enabling an AI agent to make payments using Visa-based cards within parameters set by users, such as spending limits, merchant restrictions and approval requirements. Payments will apply tokenised Visa credentials and real-time authorisation and fraud monitoring.

Visa plans to help developers add Visa payments to automated tasks built with OpenAI's coding tool Codex.