Visa's 2026 Strategy: Evolving from Processing Transactions to Orchestrating Commerce
What That Means For Its Acquirers, Issuers and Partners
Visa posted 15% revenue growth in Q1 FY2026, yet most people still missed the one line item that actually mattered.
“Other Revenue” grew 33% year-over-year. That’s now a $1.2 billion quarterly run rate.
It’s Visa’s fastest-growing business segment, and if you are like me, you are probably wondering, what does Other Revenue actually mean?
In short, Visa is systematically rebuilding itself from a card network into a commerce infrastructure company. Not by abandoning cards, but by using $17 trillion in card volume as the foundation for something much larger.
But to gain a deeper understanding, I’ve spent the past week analyzing Visa’s fiscal 2025 annual report and Q1 2026 results.
By doing so, I have extracted the three strategic moves that I believe matter most. Not for Wall Street, but for the 14,500 financial institutions, thousands of PSPs, and millions of merchants whose businesses depend on understanding where Visa is actually going.
I’m breaking this down because most of you reading this are Visa acquirers, issuers, PSPs, or partners. You need to know what Visa is building.
More importantly, you need to understand what it means for your business, especially if you want to avoid your largest partner from becoming your biggest competitor.
Let’s dive in.
Why Visa Had to Evolve
Visa’s core business faces a structural problem that has nothing to do with competition and everything to do with commoditization.
Card processing margins compress over time. Regulatory pressure on interchange continues. Alternative payment methods proliferate. Yet Visa’s network is more strategically embedded in global commerce than ever.
That’s the tension Visa needed to solve. The network is becoming increasingly critical to global money flows, but the traditional per-transaction fee model can’t capture that value anymore.
They had three options.
Defend the core and watch margins erode.
Fight for share and race to the bottom on pricing. Or
Expand what business they’re in entirely.
Visa chose the third option.
Here’s what makes their approach different. Visa isn’t making the mistake others made. They’re not bolting together legacy systems through acquisition and calling it modernization. They’re building modern infrastructure first, then layering services on top.
They call it the “Visa as a Service stack.”
This is the technical architecture for three simultaneous strategic moves.
Building a services moat through Value-Added Services.
Capturing new flows through money movement infrastructure.
Controlling the orchestration layer through tokenization.
Each move reinforces the others. Together, they transform Visa from a network that processes transactions into a platform that orchestrates commerce.
I’m going to break down how each piece works and what it means for your business. Because Visa isn’t just evolving for the sake of evolution. They’re repositioning before the market forces them to, and that repositioning affects everyone in their ecosystem.
Strategic Move #1: Building Switching Costs Through Value-Added Services
Value-Added Services revenue totaled $10.9 billion in fiscal 2025, up 24%. That’s more than double Visa’s overall revenue growth rate. Since 2021, VAS has grown at over 20% compound annual growth while maintaining discipline.
Here’s what VAS actually means in practice: Visa is systematically building switching costs in a commoditizing market.
Look at their recent acquisitions.
Pismo for $929 million in January 2024. That’s a cloud-native issuer processing platform. Visa now competes with FIS, Fiserv, and TSYS.
Featurespace for $946 million in December 2024. Real-time AI fraud prevention. Visa’s fraud stack now competes with standalone fraud vendors.
The $520 billion VAS total addressable market that Visa has quantified isn’t theoretical. It’s the revenue currently captured by processors, consultants, and fraud vendors. Visa has broken this down into four portfolios:
Issuing Solutions at $125 billion,
Acceptance Solutions at $95 billion,
Risk and Security Solutions at $150 billion, and
Advisory and Other Services at $150 billion.
If you’re an issuer, Pismo directly competes with your processor. Visa can now pitch: “Why pay a middleman when we own the rails?” That’s not a hypothetical conversation. It’s happening. (I should know, I launched the first European Visa Debit Program with Pismo & Visa, just last year).
If you’re an acquirer, Acceptance Solutions’ revenue grew from enabling Tap to Phone, Tap to Add Card, and other merchant-facing tools. Visa is moving into your value-add territory.
If you’re a PSP or processor, Risk and Security Solutions isn’t just fraud scoring. It’s Visa Protect for A2A, which means Visa wants to be the infrastructure for payments that don’t even touch Visa cards.
The strategic pattern is clear.
Use the network as the entry point. Expand into every adjacent service that creates stickiness. It’s the AWS playbook applied to payments.
But VAS revenue only works if Visa controls payment flows. Which brings us to the second strategic move.
Strategic Move #2: From Card Network to Money Movement Infrastructure
Visa processed $17 trillion in card payments in fiscal 2025. That sounds impressive until you realize they’ve identified a $200 trillion annual opportunity in money movement flows they don’t currently touch.
The breakdown:
$35 trillion in B2B payments, where Visa holds about 40% of commercial card share but massive whitespace remains.
$55 trillion in P2P, B2C, and G2C flows currently dominated by A2A, RTP, and wires.
Another $25 trillion in B2B money movement for cross-border, supplier payments, and disbursements.
Visa’s strategic answer? Stop being a card network. Become a network of networks.
Visa Direct’s 8x Growth Since 2019
Visa Direct processed 12.5 billion transactions in 2025. That makes it one of the world’s largest money movement platforms. It has 650+ partners, reaches 12 billion endpoints across cards, accounts, and wallets, and connects to 90+ domestic schemes and 60+ card and wallet networks.
Visa Direct transactions have grown roughly eightfold since 2019 to more than 12.5 billion in 2025.
This isn’t a side product. It’s Visa’s strategic hedge against card displacement.
When a P2P payment happens on Zelle and bypasses cards entirely, Visa Direct can still power the back-end disbursement. When a gig worker gets paid via Cash App, Visa Direct moves the money. When a crypto exchange pays out in fiat, Visa Direct is the bridge.
Stablecoins as Infrastructure
Visa processed $3.7 billion in stablecoin-linked card volume across 200+ countries. They’ve settled $800 million in USDC since 2023. Monthly volume is now at a $2.5 billion annualized run rate, with the strongest growth in emerging markets like Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil.
Stablecoins threatened to disintermediate card networks entirely. Settle on blockchain, bypass Visa rails, eliminate the middleman. Instead, Visa positioned as the on/off-ramp infrastructure.
Classic “if you can’t beat them, become indispensable to them” strategy.
Network of Networks Philosophy
Visa’s pitch to banks and fintechs: “You don’t need to choose between card rails, A2A networks, RTP schemes, and stablecoin settlement. We orchestrate all of them.”
If you’re a PSP, this is both an opportunity and a threat.
Opportunity if you integrate Visa Direct to offer push-to-card and push-to-account capabilities.
Threat if Visa’s network of networks positioning makes single-rail PSPs obsolete.
If you’re an issuer, Visa Direct enables you to offer instant disbursements, P2P, and bill pay, all on Visa infrastructure. But it also means Visa owns the customer experience for every non-card flow you enable.
Visa realized card share would eventually plateau. Instead of defending card share, they expanded the definition of what they process. Now, every non-card payment is an opportunity to use Visa Direct.
Controlling flows isn’t enough, though. You need to control the experience. Which brings us to the third move.
Strategic Move #3: Winning the Orchestration Layer Through Tokenization
Manual entry guest checkout has dropped from 44% of ecommerce transactions in 2019 to just 16% in 2025. Among Visa’s top 25 ecommerce merchants, it’s below 4%.
Visa owns what replaced it.
The Tokenization Takeover
50% of Visa ecommerce transactions are now tokenized. Tokenization delivered $110 billion in incremental sales for merchants in 2024, driven by a 5% authorization lift. Fraud dropped by 35%, saving $1.1 billion annually. Global Tap-to-Pay penetration reached 79%, up from 43% five years ago.
Tokenization isn’t a security feature. It’s an orchestration strategy.
Here’s how it works in practice.
Consumer adds card to a wallet like Google Pay or Apple Pay.
Visa issues a token.
Merchant stores credential for checkout as card-on-file.
Visa issues a token.
Customer taps at point-of-sale.
Visa token gets transmitted, not the card number.
And in the near future, an AI agent makes a purchase. Visa token enables autonomous commerce.
In every scenario, Visa controls the credential layer. Not the issuer. Not the merchant. Not the wallet provider.
The Orchestration Advantage
When checkout is button-based via Click to Pay, Apple Pay, or Shop Pay, Visa’s tokenization infrastructure determines which card is presented first. Whether the transaction gets approved. How fraud gets detected. Whether the merchant can retry failed transactions.
Merchants see higher approval rates. Issuers see lower fraud. Consumers see faster checkout. Everyone wins, and Visa orchestrates the entire flow.
The Agentic Commerce Bet
Visa launched Visa Intelligent Commerce in April 2025, followed shortly by the Visa Trusted Agent Protocol. This isn’t about enabling AI agents to use cards. It’s about ensuring that when agents make purchases, they do so using Visa tokens, on Visa rails, with Visa fraud protection.
Ryan McInerney said it clearly: “Agentic commerce is the next major platform shift. Visa is actively engaging with a broad range of ecosystem participants, including leading AI and technology platforms.”
If you’re an acquirer or PSP, orchestration is where margins live. If Visa controls token provisioning, authentication, and routing, you’re processing commoditized transactions while Visa captures the value of orchestration.
If you’re an issuer, token-based transactions have higher approval rates. But Visa owns the token relationship. The credential is Visa’s, just linked to your BIN.
If you’re a merchant, tokenization solves real problems like higher conversions and lower fraud. But it also means Visa intermediates your customer relationship at the payment layer.
Infrastructure commoditizes. Orchestration differentiates. Visa understood this before anyone else and built the orchestration layer on top of the infrastructure they already owned.
What This Means for Your Business
Visa is building services, capturing new flows, and controlling orchestration. Here’s what that actually means, depending on where you sit in the ecosystem.
If you’re an issuer:
Pismo means Visa can bypass your processor or become your processor directly. VAS offerings let you white-label Visa capabilities instead of building in-house. The decision you face: integrate deeper with Visa and increase dependency, or build alternatives and accept slower time-to-market.
If you’re an acquirer:
Acceptance Solutions’ revenue shows that Visa is monetizing merchant-facing tools you used to own exclusively. Tap to Phone and tokenization infrastructure expand your addressable merchant base, which is a good thing. But Visa is also competing with you on value-add, which isn’t. The decision: compete with Visa on services, or become a distribution channel for Visa’s stack.
If you’re a PSP or processor:
Visa Direct plus network of networks means Visa processes non-card flows without needing you. You can integrate Visa Direct to expand your service offerings beyond card-only. That’s faster than building competing orchestration in-house, but it also means margin compression. The decision: build your own orchestration layer at great expense and time, or integrate Visa’s stack and accept lower margins.
If you’re a merchant or platform:
You get higher approval rates, lower fraud, and better checkout experiences. All of that is real and measurable. But Visa orchestrates your payment experience in exchange, which reduces your control. The decision: accept tokenization lock-in for better performance, or diversify orchestration layers and accept some performance trade-offs.
Every stakeholder I just mentioned is simultaneously a Visa customer, partner, and competitor. That’s not accidental. That’s the strategy.
The companies that will succeed are the ones that recognize Visa’s moves early.
You’re ahead just by reading this. They’ll choose which battles to fight, because you can’t compete on all three fronts. And they’ll build where Visa isn’t, finding whitespace in orchestration, services, or flows.
The companies that will struggle are the ones still treating Visa like it’s just a card network.
That mental model is five years out of date. They’ll try to compete directly on infrastructure, which means outspending Visa’s $13 billion in annual tech investment. Or they’ll assume Visa’s strategic moves don’t affect them, which is wrong. These moves affect everyone.
The New Competitive Landscape
Visa’s $40 billion in annual revenue isn’t impressive given its scale. It’s impressive because of the strategic position that revenue represents.
The three moves work because they’re interconnected.
VAS creates switching costs, which increases dependence on Visa services.
Money movement captures non-card flows, which expands the addressable market.
Orchestration controls the experience, which maintains relevance as payment methods proliferate.
Remove any one of these, and the strategy weakens. Together, they’re formidable.
The timeline matters too. Visa isn’t waiting for markets to mature. They’re positioning in advance of agentic commerce going mainstream in 2027-2028, stablecoin regulatory clarity enabling institutional adoption in 2026, guest checkout extinction happening right now, and A2A and RTP reaching scale in developed markets over the next five years.
By the time these shifts are obvious to everyone else, Visa will already be the infrastructure powering them.
The payment networks that thrived from 1970 to 2020 processed transactions. The infrastructure companies that will thrive from 2025 to 2045 will orchestrate commerce.
Visa is betting $13 billion in annual tech investment that they can be both. The question for everyone else is simpler: can you?
Thank you for reading.
P.S. If you are looking for a Payments Strategist to help you figure out what to focus on or organize an event or webinar where you need someone to educate and/or challenge your audience on what’s happening in payments, please don’t hesitate to email or DM me to set up a call.
Or if you appreciate my work, feel free to buy me a coffee!