Visa CEO Says Company Now a Payments ‘Hyperscaler’

Visa’s fiscal fourth quarter results, released after the markets closed on Tuesday (Oct. 28) showed growth in debit and credit spending, a surge in tokenized credentials and momentum in stablecoin-related activity.

The company’s materials indicated that U.S. payments volume was up 8%, accelerating from the previous quarter. Credit and debit spending both were 8% higher.

“When looking at quarterly spend category data in the U.S., we saw broad-based strength, including improvements in retail services and goods, travel and fuel. Both discretionary and nondiscretionary spend were up from Q3,” CFO Chris Suh said on the call.

“Visa’s Network of Networks now has approximately 12 billion endpoints. That’s about 4 billion cards, bank accounts and digital wallets, each,” said CEO Ryan McInerney.

Value-added services revenue grew 25% in constant dollars to $3 billion,” the CFO said, driven in part by issuing solutions.

McInerney said on the conference call, “Visa has become a hyperscaler, enabling anyone that wants to be in the money movement or payments business to build on top of the Visa-as-a-service stack.”

In discussing the growth in new connectivity and payments flows, McInerney said that the company has been adding support for four stablecoins, where those coins can be converted to more than two dozen fiat currencies. The monthly volume across Visa’s blockchains available for settlement has passed a $2.5 billion annualized run rate.

The payments giant has also been deploying what McInerney said is “the next generation of VisaNet … [which] offers a cloud-ready microservices distributed, modular architecture that uses open languages and technologies, enabling easier scaling, configuration, and faster feature deployment. Over half of the new code base was built with the assistance of generative AI,” he said.

Growth in Visa Tokens

There are more than 16 billion issued tokens, up from 10 billion in May 2024. “We continue to increase the amount of Visa tokens globally in pursuit of our ultimate goal of 100% of e-Commerce transactions tokenized,” McInerney said on the call.

“Our Visa credential continues to gain momentum, enabling consumers to access many underlying funding sources with a single credential powered by Visa token technology,” said McInerney, who added that “the pipeline is strong, and we now have more than 20 signed clients in more than 20 countries across all region.”

As for contactless payments, commentary on the call noted that 79% of all face-to-face transactions were tap to pay, up 8% through the year; the U.S. tally stands at 66% on in person transactions.

Full year fiscal 2025 commercial payments volume was up 7% in constant currency to $1.8 billion.

Suh noted that cross-border volumes were strong, up 11%, with eCommerce up 13% and travel improving sequentially to 10%. “eCommerce remained strong as it has for the last eight quarters now and still represented about 40% of our total cross-border volume. Travel spend continued to grow above pre-COVID levels,” he said.

Visa Direct transactions were up 23% to 3.4 billion transactions, Suh said. The company expects adjusted net revenue growth to be in the low double digits for the current fiscal year.

Shares were up 0.6% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

During the conference call question-and-answer session, McInerney said that during the fourth quarter “higher spending cardholders [were] driving more of the growth. And that’s consistent with what we see across the U.S. economy. That gives us good reason to say … the consumer has remained resilient.”

Asked on the call about agentic commerce, McInerney said, “When we had the first wave of digital commerce with eCommerce, we set the standards. We led the product development, and Visa was a significant beneficiary.

“Then you saw a second wave of commerce, which was mobile commerce. And again, Visa was the leader in terms of standards, in terms of product innovation, and in terms of the capabilities enabling that to happen. And we’ve been a big beneficiary. You’ve seen that both in people buying things on their phones, but also using their phones to buy things, especially with tap to pay.

“And now in this third wave of agentic commerce, we’ve been leading in terms of our role of setting the standards,” he said. McInerney pointed to Visa Intelligent Commerce as a key example, with tokenization, AI-powered personalization, and the company’s data token service enabling standard that translate into what he termed “clear guidance for agent transactions. … The Visa trusted agent protocol is meant to really ensure that merchants know when an agent is coming to buy something on my behalf.”

And, he added, “I think there’s an upside case on that where you could actually see users buying from a much larger and more diverse set of merchants than they do today in traditional eCommerce, given the power of these agents and their ability to go out and search the world’s inventory based on whatever it is that you prefer for your agent. That might be value, that might be price, that might be inventory, that might be speed of delivery. I think that could ultimately result in consumers buying more things from more merchants … which ultimately means transactions on Visa.”