Imagine standing at a bustling counter in Italy, ready to make a purchase, only to have your card unexpectedly declined, with no explanation and no chance to fix the problem on the spot. For one Visa executive, this wasn’t just a minor inconvenience; it was a pivotal moment of truth. Bereft of a real-time alert or guidance, he simply reached for another card, swiftly shifting his loyalty without hesitation.
In today’s fast-paced digital marketplace, these fleeting seconds at checkout are where customer allegiances are won or lost. As highlighted in Visa’s “Beyond the Card” interview series with PYMNTS, the competition for “top of wallet” isn’t about the card’s design, but about the intelligence, seamlessness and trustworthiness woven into its digital credentials.
Through five in-depth interviews, a clear pattern emerges: credit cards are evolving from “a way to pay” into always-on, data-enriched digital credentials that shape the customer experience at every stage (before, during and after each transaction). This evolution carries profound implications for banks, issuers, merchants and FinTechs, all vying for a share of consumers’ wallets.
Five Themes Shaping the Landscape of Today’s Digital Marketplace:
- The credential is becoming a platform, not a number. The digital credential is the foundation for delivering experiences that feel seamless and invisible to consumers. It is an architecture that helps issuers show up wherever customers transact.
- “Near real time” is the minimum viable expectation. From onboarding to authorizations to subscription management to fraud prompts, the series repeatedly returns to one operational truth: Batch-era systems cannot support modern digital expectations.
- AI is becoming the interface layer for financial relationships. Artificial intelligence (AI) is less about novelty and more about making complex financial decisions intuitive, turning payment data into contextual guidance, embedded directly into day-to-day journeys.
- Continuity drives loyalty, especially when life happens. Consumers don’t just want fraud protection, a replacement card or a refreshed wallet credential. They want uninterrupted spending, preserved preferences and immediate control when something changes.
- Loyalty is shifting from “rewards math” to contextual value. With consumers enrolled in many programs but actively using far fewer, loyalty becomes a timing and relevance problem, and increasingly a data and orchestration problem.
Together, these themes redefine what “top of wallet” means. It becomes less about which card offers the richest points and more about which digital credential consistently works, explains itself, travels across channels and helps consumers make smarter decisions in the flow of life.
The Series, Synthesized: Five Conversations, One Strategic Arc
Redefining top of wallet: digital credentials as the “operating system”
In the kickoff conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Visa’s Jeffrey Chen (VP, Digital Issuer Solutions Portfolio) sets the stage. Cards are evolving beyond payment instruments, and the competitive center is shifting to digital credentials and the experiences built around them. Visa’s ambition, Chen said, is to become an “operating system” that helps issuers meet everyday digital spending needs—making it easier not only to design great consumer journeys, but to deploy them at scale.
A key point for banks and FinTechs is that consumers do not reward technology for its own sake. They reward outcomes. Chen repeatedly stresses that what matters is whether new technologies make experiences “more convenient, more intelligent, more secure and more integrated.”
In that context, AI becomes a translation layer between complexity and usability, enabling more natural interactions and real-time personalization. It also serves as a strategic tool for inclusion, helping demystify financial products for consumers who previously found them inaccessible. And for issuers staring at a fast-moving technology curve, the call to action is collaboration. “The only wrong thing to do is nothing.”
Smart onboarding: Where FIs win (or lose) the issuer relationship on day one
If the credential is the platform, onboarding is the moment the platform is activated. In Episode One, Chen argues that onboarding is no longer a narrow technical step. Instead, it is “the foundation” for how consumers pay, track goals and interact with their financial institution across channels. The shift from a static 16-digit PAN to a flexible digital credential can change what issuers can deliver, enabling broader payment methods and enhanced experiences.
The strategic orientation is explicit and consumer-centric. “To me, everything comes down to the consumer,” Chen said. In practice, “smart onboarding” means setting the customer up with the proper support and digital experience “on day one,” and then keeping those experiences working seamlessly behind the scenes.
The operational obstacle, Chen notes, is that many institutions still treat onboarding breakdowns as either technical or process issues. But it is both, compounded by an infrastructure that cannot act on real-time information. Visa offers automatic credential continuity, meaning that even if a card is compromised or needs to be reissued by the financial institution, everything happens automatically. This approach can reduce manual processes, enabling consumers to resume spending quickly and with minimal hassle.
Subscriptions and recurring payments: Turning “asymmetric information” into intelligent spending with digital credentials
Episode Two moves from onboarding into a daily reality: recurring payments. Subscriptions are now a defining feature of digital commerce. But they also expose a persistent gap—what Visa characterizes as “asymmetric information” among consumers, merchants and issuers.
Consumers often don’t know where credentials are stored, when payments are due or whether the merchant has changed the price. Merchants see cancellations, but not the intent behind them. Chen’s framing matters for the ecosystem because it links customer experience to measurable commercial outcomes. Information gaps drive missed payments, churn and ineffective win-back. The pain compounds when consumers have to replace a card, forcing them to manually update credentials across merchants—previously “one of the biggest pain points” in subscriptions.
Visa’s solution is a subscription management hub designed to help issuers give consumers visibility and control. This includes knowing what they have, when payments are coming and whether the merchant has changed the price. Underneath the interface is a portability premise. Credentials should transfer securely so updates can be “automatic” and “seamless,” reducing friction for consumers and failure rates for merchants.
AI is the accelerant here, not as a headline feature but as a functional capability. Consumers increasingly want readily available AI-based tools to manage subscriptions and spending. These tools allow them to receive value from context and recommendations rather than raw transaction history. As Chen puts it, intelligence is not intrinsic to the credential itself; it is built through the experiences around it.
Trust, security and the “moment that matters”: When a decline becomes a loyalty event
Episode Three makes the series’ implicit stakes explicit. In commerce, trust is tested in seconds. Chen’s Italy anecdote illustrates that while fraud rules may be rational, the customer experience can still fail if issuers don’t provide immediate, contextual communication. When consumers don’t understand what happened and can’t fix it immediately, they may pivot to another credential.
Visa’s strategic point is not “decline less;” it’s “resolve faster.” The optimal experience is a timely prompt that explains why the issuer challenged the transaction, allowing the consumer to confirm the transaction’s legitimacy and continue spending. This is where tokenization and orchestration become foundational. When an issuer must reissue a card, consumers want uninterrupted spending. Visa explains how it maps tokens stored in wallets to a new PAN, allowing wallet transactions to continue uninterrupted.
The same model extends into forward-looking commerce models, including agentic commerce. If an AI agent shops on a consumer’s behalf, security and control must be easier, smarter and more real time. Chen’s throughline is consumer empowerment. The best outcomes occur when the system is “putting the power back in the hands of consumers.”
Loyalty beyond points: Context, funding models and the “fight for every transaction”
Episode Four expands “beyond the card” into loyalty—where consumer expectations are changing, and traditional mechanics are no longer enough. Avery Walter Miller (VP, Loyalty Solutions, Visa) argues that rewards must be meaningful and contextual, delivered when consumers are ready to engage.
Two commercial pressures sit underneath this shift. First, consumers oversubscribe to loyalty. On average, they belong to an average of 16 to 19 programs but actively engage with roughly half of them. Second, margin pressures mean banks can’t rely exclusively on card economics to fund loyalty, which is now “essential” to find new funding sources.
Visa’s answer focuses on data, partnerships and orchestration. Merchant-funded offers can create a new economic engine for rewards while improving conversion rates and basket size for merchants. But the experience must be relevant. Miller’s example is that the “right offer” is not just about preference; it’s about timing and context in the customer’s day.
Finally, loyalty technology is fragmented, and banks don’t have infinite integration capacity. “There is no silver bullet for loyalty technology,” Miller said, describing Visa’s role in “stitching together” complex capabilities into consumable offerings across channels. As AI advances, the competitive arena tightens further. In an AI-agent world, Miller predicts “the fight” will happen “for every single transaction.”
The card is still there, but the battleground has moved to digital credentials.
Taken together, the “Beyond the Card” series makes a single, coherent observation. Issuers will win the future of payments competition through digital credentials and the experiences around them—not through a plastic form factor. Credentials are becoming a portable, tokenized, real-time capability that can carry trust, continuity and intelligence across channels and moments of truth.
For issuers, the mandate is clear. Winning top of wallet is increasingly about delivering an “always on” relationship. This starts with smart onboarding, expands into subscription and spend management, proves itself in security-critical moments and evolves into contextual loyalty, not clutter. As AI and agentic commerce raise expectations for immediacy and control, the institutions that modernize infrastructure, orchestrate experiences in real time and co-develop responsibly will earn—and keep—the next generation of “top of wallet.”
