Visa doubles down on stablecoins and AI agents

Today's Forum announcements: tokenized deposits, 160+ card programs, and new AI tools

@Visa used its Payments Forum in San Francisco on June 10 to announce a raft of new capabilities across AI, stablecoins, and token infrastructure. The headline items include new Agent Scoring, an Agentic Registry, and a Large Transaction Model, alongside stablecoin settlement and token enhancements designed to support what the company calls intelligent, programmable commerce. The Forum release notes that stablecoin pilots are expanding across multiple regions, blockchains, and currencies, without naming specific chains.

The card count has also grown. As of April, Visa ran more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs across more than 50 countries. The Forum materials put that figure at more than 160, a jump that reflects the pace at which issuers are building on the network. Seven-day settlement, previously available to issuers, is also being extended to acquirers.

The broader context matters here. Visa's CFO Chris Suh has been candid that agentic commerce and stablecoins are investments without immediate ROI, saying "they won't pay off in the next six months, but could over the next six years." Visa reported strong core business results in Q2 2026, with net revenue of $11.2 billion, up 17% year on year.

@OpenAI partnership puts AI agents at the checkout

Visa announced a strategic collaboration with @OpenAI to enable secure Visa payments within agentic commerce, with the announcement made at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco. As part of the partnership, Visa's payment capabilities will be integrated into OpenAI experiences, giving developers and merchants a streamlined way to accept Visa payments initiated by agents.

Transactions will operate within clearly defined user permissions, policies and controls, such as spending limits and merchant categories, and will use tokenized Visa credentials with real-time authorization and fraud monitoring. On the developer side, Visa and OpenAI will explore enterprise applications including developer-focused experiences powered by Codex, as well as more automated and conversational workflows. Axios reported that OpenAI's Codex coding agents could eventually use authenticated payment credentials to purchase additional inference, APIs, or other services autonomously within user-defined limits.

Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa, said: "AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did." The collaboration sits within the broader Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative, focused on extending secure payment capabilities into new digital environments. Visa's position, as Forestell frames it, is to sit between AI reshaping the front end of commerce and stablecoins reshaping the back end.

For context on the stablecoin numbers: Visa's stablecoin pilot reached a $7 billion annualized settlement run rate, a 50% surge since the December 2025 quarter, as announced in April. That figure started at more than $3.5 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement volume when Visa launched USDC settlement in the United States. The nine-blockchain expansion, adding Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Arc, and Tempo to existing chains, was also part of that April announcement.

Sources:
Visa Investor Relations: Visa Partners with OpenAI to Power the Next Generation of AI Commerce
Axios: Visa, OpenAI bring agentic commerce to ChatGPT
Fortune: Visa's CFO views stablecoins and AI commerce as a long-term bet