Visa is introducing new capabilities and expanding its platforms to support automated, AI-driven digital commerce.
Announced at the Visa Payments Forum 2026, the updates focus on building core frameworks for autonomous transactions and modernising backend payment infrastructure.
To support agent-driven commerce, Visa introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce, an architecture designed to provide trust, controls, and connectivity for AI agents.
As part of this ecosystem development, Visa announced a collaboration with OpenAI to enable secure payments using Visa infrastructure within agentic commerce environments.
“AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end,”
said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa.
“Visa’s role is to enable it to work securely, reliably and at global scale, for every participant in the ecosystem.”
To help businesses adapt, Visa introduced Agent Score, a readiness evaluation tool for agentic commerce, alongside the Agentic Directory, a verified registry of legitimate merchants and agents.
The network also deployed its Large Transaction Model, an AI system trained on billions of data points to improve fraud detection while reducing false declines.
On the backend, Visa is expanding stablecoin settlement pilots across multiple blockchains, currencies, and regions.
Building on earlier pilots, the network has moved billions of dollars in stablecoins across VisaNet, reaching an annualised run rate of approximately US$7 billion as of March 2026.
This enables issuing banks to settle onchain seven days a week, with plans to extend this capability further across the ecosystem.
The payment network is also building infrastructure to help banks convert traditional deposits into programmable, always-on tokenised deposits.
Visa continues to expand its stablecoin-linked card programs, with more than 160 initiatives live or in development globally.
For financial institutions, Visa is offering modular infrastructure through its cloud-native Pismo core banking platform.
It also highlighted Unified Checkout, an orchestration layer designed to support both card and non-card payments within existing merchant systems.
Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by yelosole via Magnific
