Visa says stablecoins are ‘reshaping the back end’ of commerce as it expands AI, tokenization efforts

Visa used its annual payments forum on Wednesday to position stablecoins as a growing part of global payments infrastructure, outlining its initiatives spanning settlement, tokenization, and artificial intelligence. During a keynote presentation, Jack Forestell, the company's chief product and strategy officer, argued that stablecoins and AI are reshaping different layers of the payments stack. "AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end," said Forestell. "Visa's role is to enable it to work securely, reliably and at global scale, for every participant in the ecosystem." In a Wednesday statement, Visa said it is expanding its stablecoin settlement pilots across various regions, blockchains, and currencies. The company reiterated that it has moved billions of dollars in stablecoins through VisaNet, with the annualized run rate reaching $7 billion as of March 2026. "With issuing banks already settling seven days a week onchain with Visa, Visa is also working to extend seven-day settlement to include acquirers, increasing flexibility and frequency across the entire ecosystem," the company said. Tokenization, AI push On the tokenization front, Visa said it will build the technology layer for tokenized deposits, allowing banks to turn traditional deposits into programmable, always-on digital money while keeping funds on their balance sheets. Meanwhile, Visa is enriching token data to provide more details on tokenized transaction types and token location, alongside a token assurance signal, which evaluates token use throughout its lifecycle to generate a trust score for each transaction. Visa added that these features give issuers stronger signals for authorization decisions and help merchants reduce false declines. The rollout is part of the payments network's broader plan to address a structural shift toward "agentic commerce," where automated AI agents initiate transactions on behalf of consumers and enterprises, the company…

Visa says stablecoins are ‘reshaping the back end’ of commerce as it expands AI, tokenization efforts

Related stories

It's not SpaceX. Bitcoin ETF outflows may be an arbitrage story

AI models led to a ‘vulnerability apocalypse’ in crypto security: Immunefi CEO

Michael Saylor and Jack Mallers go toe-to-toe over Strategy's bitcoin reporting metrics