Visa's AI Commerce and USDC Push Is Worth More Than the Market Thinks

Visa's Intelligent Commerce platform connects AI agents to the payments infrastructure. Think about what that means practically: when an AI agent books a flight, orders supplies, or manages subscriptions on behalf of a consumer or business, it needs a payment rail. Visa is positioning itself as that rail.

The company's investment in tokenisation — over 10 billion tokens now active on its network — is the technical foundation. Tokenised transactions are more secure, more programmable, and more amenable to AI-initiated commerce than traditional card-present or card-not-present flows. Visa processes roughly 300 billion transactions annually. If even 5% of those shift to AI-initiated flows by 2030, that represents 15 billion incremental high-margin transactions.

We've seen Visa execute this kind of platform expansion before. The shift to e-commerce in the 2010s was supposed to disintermediate card networks. Instead, Visa's share of digital payments grew. The shift to mobile wallets was supposed to disrupt the incumbent. Instead, Apple Pay runs on Visa's rails. The pattern is clear: new commerce modalities don't displace Visa — they ride on top of it.

Visa's USDC push is the other leg of the growth story. By enabling USDC settlements across its network, Visa is inserting itself into the $200 billion stablecoin market — which is growing 40%+ annually and is projected to exceed $1 trillion by 2028.

The economics are compelling. Cross-border payments currently generate approximately $8-9 billion of Visa's revenue, with take rates of 0.3-0.5%. Stablecoin-based cross-border settlements could expand the addressable market by 3-4x by including B2B flows, remittances, and treasury operations that currently bypass card networks entirely. Even at lower take rates of 0.1-0.2%, the incremental revenue opportunity is $4-6 billion annually.

Visa returned $18.5 billion to shareholders in FY2025 through buybacks and dividends. The company repurchased 3.2% of shares outstanding at an average price that now looks prescient. The dividend yield of 0.7% is modest, but the payout ratio of just 22% leaves enormous room for growth.

Operating margins sit at 68.3% — the highest of any large-cap financial company globally. Net margins at 50.2% are similarly unmatched. These are not margins that compress easily. Visa's operating leverage is extreme: every incremental dollar of payment volume flows through at near-zero marginal cost.

With $40 billion in revenue and margins that would make software companies envious, Visa generates more free cash flow per employee than virtually any company outside of pure-play asset managers. Management deploys that cash with discipline: no dilutive acquisitions, consistent buybacks, and R&D spending focused on maintaining the network's technological edge.