Visa Earnings Spotlight Agentic Commerce as Next Growth Engine

Visa’s latest earnings Tuesday (April 28) showed a company still getting plenty of lift from card spending while pushing deeper into stablecoins, blockchain and artificial intelligence-driven commerce.

CEO Ryan McInerney set the tone early in the call by tying together the durability of the core business with the promise of newer rails. “Stablecoins and blockchain are significant opportunities,” adding that “we’ve established Visa’s role as a key interoperability layer between this powerful infrastructure and real-world solutions for users.”  He also emphasized that consumer, commercial and money movement flows continue to advance in parallel.

That framing carried through the discussion, where Visa repeatedly returned to the idea that its future lies in scaling infrastructure, where the CEO noted the growth potential as a “hyperscaler of payments,” a term that embraces volume growth and the expanding range of use cases running across its network.

From Network to Infrastructure Layer

The concept of hyperscaling rests in part on Visa’s push into what it termed agentic commerce. Management described a near-term environment in which software agents initiate and complete transactions, often in small increments and with minimal human intervention.

Tokenization, credential management and fraud controls are expected to underpin these new transaction flows, particularly as agents require trusted payment methods. McInerney noted that agents are likely to fragment purchases into multiple transactions, while also creating entirely new categories of microtransactions.

During the analyst question-and-answer session, he sharpened that point by focusing on trust as the limiting factor in adoption. Consumers, McInerney  said, will default to payment methods they recognize when delegating spending decisions to software agents.

At the same time, Visa is positioning its infrastructure to accommodate blockchain-based activity, acting as a “bridge layer” between on-chain assets and real-world payments, pointing to use cases such as stablecoin-linked cards and settlement capabilities that operate beyond traditional banking hours.

Growth Anchored in Consumer Activity

Net revenue rose 17% year over year to $11.2 billion, while earnings growth kept pace, according to the company’s financial presentation.  U.S. debit card spending gained 7%, while credit volumes were up 10%, both measured in constant dollar terms.

Chris Suh, Visa’s chief financial officer, emphasized that growth remained broad-based. “Across our volume, both discretionary and nondiscretionary spend remained strong. We do not see signs of the lower-spend consumer weakening in our volumes,” he told analysts, underscoring resilience across income segments.

Cross-border activity also remained firm, supported by travel and eCommerce trends, even as geopolitical factors created some regional variability.

Visa Direct continued to expand as part of the company’s push into money movement. Transactions on that network climbed more than 20% year over year, supported by both domestic and cross-border use cases. At the same time, value-added services, including fraud prevention and marketing tools, contributed a growing share of revenue, reinforcing the company’s effort to monetize capabilities beyond basic transaction processing.

Credentials also remained central to the strategy. Visa’s flexible credential framework, which allows multiple funding sources to sit behind a single payment identity, was highlighted as a way to unify card-based and non-card-based transactions.

Stablecoins as Extension, Not Disruption

Perhaps the most notable shift in the quarter was the company’s detailed articulation of its stablecoin strategy. Management described a model in which stablecoins function primarily as a store of value and settlement mechanism, while Visa’s network handles acceptance and transaction routing.

“We currently have a $7 billion annual run rate of stablecoin settlement volume, and it’s growing fast, up more than 50% since last quarter,” McInerney said.

Examples included stablecoin-linked cards that allow consumers to spend digital assets at traditional merchants, as well as settlement options that enable transactions outside standard banking hours. The company also pointed to its growing role in blockchain infrastructure, including validator positions on select networks.

Importantly, executives stressed that the economics of these transactions resemble those of existing products. In answering a question on unit economics, McInerney indicated that spending through stablecoin-linked credentials carries similar characteristics to traditional card usage, reinforcing the view that these innovations extend the current model rather than replace it.

Looking ahead, Visa raised its full-year outlook, citing continued strength across its core drivers. Management expects revenue growth in the low double-digit to low-teens range, supported by stable consumer activity and expanding demand for value-added services.

McInerney closed the call with a measured but confident assessment of the company’s trajectory. “We have deep conviction in our ability to grow revenue well into the future, not just for the next three to five years, but beyond,” he said, pointing to the combined impact of consumer payments, money movement, stablecoins and AI-driven services.

Shares surged 4.8% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.