Visa says stablecoins are 'reshaping the back end' of commerce as it expands AI, tokenization efforts

Visa used its annual payments forum on Wednesday to position stablecoins as a growing part of global payments infrastructure, outlining its initiatives spanning settlement, tokenization, and artificial intelligence.

During a keynote presentation, Jack Forestell, the company's chief product and strategy officer, argued that stablecoins and AI are reshaping different layers of the payments stack.

"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."

In a Wednesday statement, Visa said it is expanding its stablecoin settlement pilots across various regions, blockchains, and currencies. The company reiterated that it has moved billions of dollars in stablecoins through VisaNet, with the annualized run rate reaching $7 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," the company said.

Tokenization, AI push

On the tokenization front, Visa said it will build the technology layer for tokenized deposits, allowing banks to turn traditional deposits into programmable, always-on digital money while keeping funds on their balance sheets.

Meanwhile, Visa is enriching token data to provide more details on tokenized transaction types and token location, alongside a token assurance signal, which evaluates token use throughout its lifecycle to generate a trust score for each transaction. Visa added that these features give issuers stronger signals for authorization decisions and help merchants reduce false declines.

The rollout is part of the payments network's broader plan to address a structural shift toward "agentic commerce," where automated AI agents initiate transactions on behalf of consumers and enterprises, the company said.

Visa has introduced Agent Score, which lets merchants evaluate whether AI agents can navigate and complete tasks on their websites. The company has also launched Agentic Directory, a verified registry of agents and merchants that Visa has approved as legitimate participants in agentic commerce.

Additionally, the company unveiled Large Transaction Model, an AI model trained on billions of transactions. Visa said the model is designed to improve fraud detection while increasing authorization performance and reducing false declines. 

OpenAI partnership 

In a separate Wednesday statement, Visa said it has partnered with OpenAI to enable Visa payments within agentic commerce environments.

The company said the partnership will allow developers and merchants to accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents under user-defined controls, including spending limits, merchant restrictions, and approval requirements.

Payments will use tokenized Visa credentials alongside real-time authorization and fraud monitoring, according to the statement. The integration is also expected to support developer-focused applications, including Codex-based workflows, and other automated and conversational commerce use cases.