Visa’s 2025 annual report points to AI‑driven agentic commerce and full tokenisation as the forces set to reshape global payments
Visa has flagged AI-driven commerce and tokenisation as the next defining payments trends in its 2025 annual report.
The report, published on November 6, highlights another strong year for the company, with revenue growing 11% to $40bn and Visa-branded transactions reaching 329 billion, averaging 901 million per day.
While CEO Ryan McInerney described 2025 as a “fundamental rewiring of how money moves around the world,” it is his outlook for the year ahead which is most revealing.
With Europe actively seeking to reduce reliance on US payment giants, Visa’s answer is not to back away from cards but to broaden its role, referring to itself as a “network of networks” which connects more than 12 billion endpoints across cards, accounts, wallets and emerging rails.
At the centre of this strategy is Visa-as-a-Service, a modular stack which covers tokenisation, identity tools, risk analytics, issuer and merchant software and account-to-account money movement.
Built on a common connectivity layer across 200 markets, McInerney says it shows Visa’s ambition to act as the “hyperscaler” behind global commerce, processing hundreds of millions of transactions daily.
Visa says this architecture will guide its strategy for the next decade as payments become more embedded and software-driven, meaning even if card usage declines, its presence will remain.
Two trends to keep an eye on
At the start of 2025, headlines were dominated by talk of an AI arms race between the US and China. Visa’s annual report suggests payments may now have its own version of that race, with the technology set to redefine how transactions take place.
What McInerney was referring to is agentic commerce, a shift where Generative AI moves past recommendations and discovery to actually making purchases on behalf of consumers.
The topic wasn’t discussed a lot in the year’s opening months, but there were still experts warning the industry of its disruptive potential.
At Money20/20 in Amsterdam earlier this year, fintech expert David Birch and Interac’s Debbie Gamble argued using AI for call centres or incremental efficiency gains is wasted, and the real disruption will come when bots transact directly, creating both new opportunities and new risks.
“We built this fantastic infrastructure… But what we believe is that AI is actually going to change fundamentally, not just that infrastructure, but a world where the bots are making the decisions on behalf of the customers,” Birch told delegates.
Gamble explained how enabling non-human agents to act safely requires a new kind of digital public infrastructure, with fresh policies, rules and frameworks for engagement.
Just months later, Visa launched its Trusted Agent Protocol to give AI agents Visa credentials so they can pay securely across the ecosystem.
A second trend Visa highlights as one to watch out for is tokenisation, which it describes as the backbone of future digital payments. McInerney’s letter notes manual card entry is rapidly disappearing, with only 16% of Visa ecommerce transactions now relying on it, down from 44% in 2019.
More than half of ecommerce transactions on Visa’s network are already tokenised and the company says this has boosted authorisation rates, reduced fraud, and added over $100bn in incremental merchant sales.
