Visa puts stablecoins at the core of global payments…

Visa used its annual payments forum to declare stablecoins a structural pillar of global commerce, with the company's chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell framing the shift in stark terms: "AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end." The network's stablecoin settlement run rate hit $7 billion annualized as of March 2026, with pilots now spanning multiple regions, blockchains, and currencies.

Why it matters

Visa's public positioning at a flagship industry event is a signal that stablecoin infrastructure has crossed from experimental to strategic for the world's largest payments network. The company is building a technology layer for tokenized deposits — allowing banks to convert traditional deposits into programmable, always-on digital money while keeping funds on their balance sheets. Issuing banks are already settling seven days a week on-chain through VisaNet, and Visa is now extending that 24/7 settlement window to acquirers, tightening the entire ecosystem's liquidity cycle.

Market impact

The OpenAI partnership is the headline-grabbing addition: Visa will enable payments initiated by AI agents within agentic commerce environments, with tokenized Visa credentials, real-time fraud monitoring, and user-defined spending controls. Visa's new Agent Score and Agentic Directory tools create a verified trust layer for AI-driven transactions. The Large Transaction Model — trained on billions of Visa transactions — targets fraud reduction and fewer false declines. Together, these moves position Visa as the compliance and settlement backbone for the emerging AI-agent economy, raising the stakes for any stablecoin or payments competitor not already embedded in a network of this scale.