- Visa has partnered with OpenAI to support AI-driven digital commerce.
- The firm is upgrading its payment tokens to improve security and authorisation.
- Visa is expanding stablecoin settlements and developing programmable digital money.
On Thursday, 11 June, digital payments network Visa revealed its new initiatives across AI-driven commerce, tokenised deposits, and stablecoins.
The announcement, made during the Visa Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco, highlighted:
- Visa’s partnership with OpenAI, aimed at bolstering agentic commerce;
- Advancements to Visa’s tokens, including boosting their dataset;
- An initiative to build a new technology layer designed to create programmable digital money from traditional deposits; and
- Expanding Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilots across jurisdictions.
Visa’s partnership with OpenAI is intended to couple OpenAI’s conversational, agentic interface with Visa’s payment infrastructure and network. It will allow merchants to obtain an agent score that determines whether AI agents can operate across their websites.
Merchants and agents will be provided with a directory of legitimate, verified participants in agentic commerce, as well as a large transaction model – an AI model with enhanced fraud detection capabilities.
“We believe a growing share of creation and transactions will be led by developers using AI tools,” said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa.
Visa has also announced it will be amending its tokens to improve the validity of payment authorisation decisions. Tokens, in this context, are datasets that enable digital payments.
The new approach targets increased data and context to be utilised in commerce. A token assurance signal, which refers to a dynamic trust score generated by evaluating the behaviour of a digital token through its lifecycle, will also be introduced.
As Forestell put it, “AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end.”
Stablecoins are digital assets on blockchain rails pegged to an underlying asset, usually the US dollar. From 2020 to 2025, volumes of transactions using stablecoins jumped from $565 billion to $11 trillion, marking an annual growth rate of around 80%.
During the announcement, Visa highlighted its recent progress in modernising settlement infrastructure. A key part of this is an upcoming technology layer that will turn traditional deposits into programmable digital money, allowing banks to keep pace with the speed of stablecoins.
Visa’s stablecoin capabilities support nine blockchains at the moment, reaching a $7 billion annualised settlement run rate. The payments network has been launching stablecoin settlement pilot programmes across different jurisdictions, including North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), the Middle East, and Africa.
However, different jurisdictions continue to have varied regulatory clarity when it comes to the use of stablecoins, creating risk of friction.
