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An increasing focus on stablecoin initiatives, agentic commerce, and payments innovation helped propel Visa Inc. to a strong 2025 fiscal year and helped the card network to meet its goal of becoming a “hyperscaler” for companies in the payment ecosystem, Visa chief executive Ryan McInerney told analysts during Visa’s 2025 fiscal year earnings call late Tuesday.
A hyperscaler is a tech company that can provide scalable computing, storage, and networking services via cloud computing.
For the 2025 fiscal year ending Sept. 30, Visa’s payment volume totaled $14 trillion, an 8% increase from 2024, while processed transactions grew 10% to 258 billion and cross-border volume increased 13%, the company reported.
Key to Visa’s hyperscaler ambition is its technology stack, a modular platform that provides access to Visa’s technology, data, and network capabilities, McInerney told analysts. During the 2025 fiscal year, Visa intensified its investment in its tech stack to better position the network to “build the future of payments,” McInerney said.
Visa’s tech stack comprises four components: the foundation layer, services, solutions, and access. Those components enable “anyone that wants to be in the money-movement or payments business to build on top of the Visa-as-a-Service stack,” McInerney said.
In this connection, one area Visa is pursuing is stablecoins. During the 2025 fiscal year, Visa added settlement support for four new stablecoins running on four separate blockchains. The new stablecoins support two different cryptocurrencies that can be converted into more than 25 traditional fiat currencies. Since 2020, Visa has facilitated more than $140 billion in crypto and stablecoin flows, while Visa users have purchased more than $100 billion in crypto and stablecoin assets using Visa credentials, McInerney said. In addition, Visa counts more than 130 stablecoin-linked card-issuing programs in more than 40 countries.
Areas where Visa sees “tangible opportunities” to invest in stablecoin initiatives include cross-border payments as well as emerging markets where the card network has a low penetration rate, McInerney said.
Agentic commerce is another area where Visa sees opportunities to invest and foster innovation, said McInerney, who cited the recent launch of Visa’s Trusted Agent agentic commerce protocol. The protocol is intended to help merchants distinguish between trusted AI agents and bots launched by fraudsters.
McInerney also cited enhancements to Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platform as another example, he noted, of how Visa is taking a leadership role in agentic commerce. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platform is an artificial intelligence-based shopping service that enables AI agents to shop and make purchases for consumers.
Visa leads in setting standards for agentic commerce, McInerney said. “When new technologies emerge, we take a leadership role to enable payments [with those technologies]. We are doing the work to build infrastructure, operating rules, and processes. This is what Visa does.”
When asked how Visa’s Trusted Agent protocol differs from other agentic-commerce protocols recently introduced, such as the protocol developed by Stripe Inc. and OpenAI to provide merchant and consumer protection, McInerney separated his answer into two parts.
On the security side, McInerney cited Trusted Agents’ ability to support tokenization. “Tokenization is a critical building block to help agentic commerce reach its promise,” he said.
In addressing the competition around agentic-commerce standards, which includes Google Cloud’s and PayPal Holdings Inc.’s standard, McInerney said collaboration among competitors is a necessity in the agentic-commerce space.
To support his position, McInerney pointed to the use of open standards to build Trusted Agent so it is transparent and easy to access, use, modify, and share. An open standard is “critical to drive mass adoption of agentic commerce” and collaboration is what will “ultimately make agentic commerce work,” McInerney said.
“Trusted Agent forms a base layer others can leverage and build on,” he added.
For the quarter, Visa generated $10.7 billion in net revenue, up 12% from the 2024 fiscal fourth quarter. Adjusted net income totaled $5.8 billion, up 7%.
