Payment Networks Use Earnings Season to Press Their Case on Stablecoins

Even as policymakers continue to refine the rules of the road for stablecoins, earnings season offered a clearer view of how the payment networks are already moving from concept to execution.

That shift was evident in this week’s results from Visa and Mastercard, where management teams paired financial performance with disclosures on stablecoin settlement and emerging use cases.

For Visa, the fiscal first quarter brought measurable traction. The company reported an annualized global stablecoin settlement run rate of $4.6 billion and said it now enables stablecoin card issuance in more than 50 countries. Ryan McInerney, Visa’s CEO, framed the effort as part of a broader push to connect digital assets to everyday payments.

“Stablecoins have tremendous growth and disruption potential but are still in the very early stages of adoption for payments use cases,” McInerney said during the conference call with analysts. “Visa’s goal remains clear: build the secure and seamless interoperable layer between stablecoins and traditional fiat payment at scale across the world.”

Visa outlined several concrete steps taken during the quarter. The company expanded stablecoin settlement with USDC into the United States to improve speed and liquidity for banks and FinTechs, and it launched a global stablecoins advisory practice to help clients with strategy, market entry planning and technology enablement. McInerney said Visa is also piloting Visa Direct stablecoin payouts, allowing U.S. platforms to send funds directly to workers’ and users’ stablecoin wallets.

Visa management emphasized that these efforts are not substitutive to other parts of the business.

“The stablecoin opportunity remains additive to what Visa is doing today,” McInerney said, pointing to on-ramps and off-ramps, settlement, money movement, consulting and value-added services as parallel growth paths.

Executives also noted they do not expect stablecoins to immediately reshape mature digital payment markets, saying demand today is strongest in regions with constrained access to U.S. dollars and in cross-border scenarios where settlement speed matters most.

Stablecoins Move From Concept to Network Infrastructure

Mastercard struck a similar tone on its earnings call, describing stablecoins less as a disruptive replacement and more as another form of currency that benefits from being routed through a trusted global network.

Michael Miebach, Mastercard’s CEO, said: “For us, stablecoins and agentic commerce are emerging opportunities, ones where Mastercard has a natural role to play.” He added: “Most use cases for crypto and stablecoin today offer trading and the like. For us, it is another currency we can support within our network.”

Miebach pointed to Mastercard’s work enabling stablecoin purchases, facilitating transactions and supporting stablecoin settlement directly on its rails. He underscored why payment networks matter to broader adoption: “Trust, interoperability and global acceptance are key in all payments. That’s where we come in,” he told analysts.

During the quarter, Mastercard supported co-brand partners such as MetaMask as they expanded across geographies, worked with Gemini on what Miebach described as the first business-focused stablecoin co-brand and continued to broaden settlement capabilities, including partnerships with Ripple.

Stablecoins are also being woven into the networks’ push toward agentic commerce, where artificial intelligence (AI)-powered agents initiate transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses. McInerney, for example, described stablecoins and agentic commerce as parallel tracks, both dependent on tokenization and network-level security. Visa is working with more than 100 partners on agentic commerce and is integrating stablecoins into the same infrastructure stack that supports credentials, tokens and real-time payouts.

Both networks tied stablecoins to broader commercial ambitions.

Visa executives highlighted early progress in business payments and money movement, including stablecoin-enabled payouts through Visa Direct.

During the question and answer session with analysts, Visa’s McInerney said that “in terms of stablecoins, the areas where we see product market fit are generally the areas around the world with significant TAMs and areas where we’re actually underpenetrated today … It’s countries around the world where there’s high currency volatility or hard to access U.S. dollars … The second area where we are a good product market fit is around cross-border, whether that’s remittances, at the consumer level or whether that’s B2B payments, or even B2C payments for disbursements.”

Washington Shifts From Whether to How

That operational momentum is unfolding against a shifting regulatory backdrop.

PYMNTS reported this week that the Senate Agriculture Committee advanced a crypto market structure bill that would grant the Commodity Futures Trading Commission primary authority over spot digital commodity trading, while securities provisions remain under the Senate Banking Committee’s jurisdiction and must be merged into a final package. PYMNTS also reported that the SEC and CFTC have begun aligning on shared data standards and coordinated supervision, signaling a move away from fragmented oversight.