A Time-Tested Playbook Fuels Visa’s Growth, Its Top Brass Says

A proven business model built around executing the fundamentals in consumer and business payments was the engine for solid growth during Visa Inc.’s second quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, the card network’s top executives indicated late Tuesday.

The strength of Visa’s business model is evident in the network’s financial results for the second quarter, which saw global payments volume increase 8% year-over-year and payment volume in the United States increase 6%, despite economic uncertainties during the quarter, Visa chief executive Ryan McInerney told analysts during a conference call to discuss Visa’s quarterly results.

“Halfway through our fiscal year, consumer spending has been resilient and strong, but there is much uncertainty,” McInerney said. “Focusing on the U.S., in [the second quarter] and through April 21, we have not seen any signs of overall consumer spending weakening.” Visa’s fiscal year starts Oct. 1.

McInerney added that while “spending growth differs among consumer spend bands, with the most affluent growing the fastest, all spend bands remain resilient and consistent with past quarters.”

Among the company’s product highlights was the issuance of 1 billion tokens during the quarter, bringing the total number of Visa tokens to 13.7 billion. In e-commerce, 50% of all transactions are now tokenized, McInerney said.

In addition, total credentials grew 7% year-over-year during the quarter and Tap to Pay penetration has reached 76% of merchants globally and 60% in the U.S. Tap-to-pay penetration in the U.S. was driven by increased penetration among drugstores, quick-service restaurants and retailers. All three merchant categories have greater than 60% penetration, according to Visa.

Now Visa plans to introduce its Tap to P2P product in the U.S. through a partnership with Samsung Wallet later this year. Tap to P2P enables Visa cardholders to send and receive money with friends and family using a contactless payment method.

Stablecoins are another product on the rise, Visa says. Seven-day-a-week settlement volume for stablecoin transactions surpassed $200 million during the quarter.

While hitting that weekly volume threshold is a milestone, “it’s still early” for stablecoin activity, and the volume itself remains a “small portion” of Visa’s overall settlement volume, “but we see potential in the stablecoin space,” McInerney said.

As a result, Visa is “exploring a broader set of partnerships and opportunities” in stablecoins, an effort helped in part by a “clearer set” of regulations in the U.S., McInerney added. 

Other product highlights during the quarter included a deal with Tabapay to enable push-to-account and wallet payments, in addition to push-to-card capabilities. Visa first partnered with Tabapay to enable push-to-card payments in 2018.

Visa will also begin rolling out a completely new version of Authorize.net during the current quarter, then expand it to other countries next year. The revamped Authorize.net platform features an improved user interface, artificial intelligence capabilities with an AI agent, and an improved dashboard, according to Visa. The new platform will enable users to better “analyze data, summarize results, and adapt to rapidly changing consumer trends,” McInerney said.

Visa is also rolling out what it calls its unified checkout, which is designed to boost e-commerce conversion rates in the U.S. This will be followed by pilots in other countries during the company’s fourth quarter, which ends Sept 30.

While acknowledging that Visa is not “immune to macroeconomic impacts,” the diversity of the network’s business model “has proven to be resilient” in the face of a variety of environments, including the economic uncertainty that emerged during the company’s second quarter, McInerney said. That resiliency is expected to “play out” in Visa’s financial results for the remainder of the year, he assured analysts on the call.