Visa Direct’s global head of strategic growth explains why predictability around settlement, liquidity, fraud and data has become the industry’s harder problem to solve.
For much of the past decade, the payments industry has talked about speed as if it were the ultimate destination. Faster clearing, instant authorisation, real-time settlement. Yet as more value moves onto irrevocable rails, a different problem is coming into sharper focus.
Payments may be quicker, but they are not always clearer.
Across borders, uncertainty still defines too many payout flows. Timing can vary by corridor. FX costs are not always visible upfront. Compliance checks introduce delays that are hard to predict. For businesses operating at scale, that lack of certainty increasingly matters more than raw speed.
That is the context in which Visa Direct is positioning its strategy. According to Tim Moncrieff, Vice President and Global Head of Strategic Growth, the central challenge heading into 2026 is no longer about making payments faster, but about making them predictable.
“The majority of cross-border payouts still run on fragmented rails,” Moncrieff tells Payment Expert. “That creates uncertainty across timing, fees, FX and compliance. What clients are asking for is certainty at scale.”
Visa Direct’s answer is orchestration rather than replacement: one integration which can route payments across cards, accounts and wallets, embedding risk controls and richer data, while connecting into domestic payment systems where they deliver the best performance.
Visa Direct today supports services across more than 195 corridors and 150 currencies.
Why instant still breaks at the border
The gap between domestic instant payments and truly end-to-end cross-border experiences is not simply a technology problem. Moncrieff points to three structural reasons why “instant” becomes harder once money crosses jurisdictions.
First is regulation and compliance. Screening and validation obligations are non-negotiable if trust in the system is to be maintained. Second is monetary sovereignty. Domestic payment access is tightly managed by central banks, and this control does not disappear simply because a payment is labelled real time. Third is settlement and FX. Even where messaging is instant, settlement often still relies on processes constrained by operating hours, batch cycles or market interoperability.
“Regulatory and monetary frameworks introduce appropriate limitations,” Moncrieff says. “But settlement and FX present an opportunity for better technological solutions. That is a core foundation of what we are building, alongside the rest of the industry.”
Rather than treating regulation as friction to be bypassed, Visa Direct positions compliance as a given, and focuses innovation where it can genuinely improve outcomes without undermining safeguards.
A network of networks
Visa Direct often describes itself as a “network of networks”, and that philosophy underpins its approach to real-time reach. Instead of pushing a single rail everywhere, the platform relies on partnerships with local banks and fintechs, combined with direct connectivity to domestic payment infrastructures where appropriate.
In practice, that means real-time or near-instant processing is already possible in many jurisdictions, but extending that capability requires careful alignment with local rules and infrastructure readiness. The priority corridors are therefore shaped less by headline demand and more by where domestic systems, compliance frameworks and liquidity models can support predictable performance.
Europe offers a useful case study. With the region’s instant payments rules now live, banks and fintechs are under pressure to deliver euro instant payments without adding operational complexity. Visa Direct’s role, Moncrieff argues, is to abstract this complexity away.
“Through our licensed entities, we are a direct participant in SEPA and SEPA Instant,” he explains. “Our imperative is to route payments through the appropriate local network that supports international payments and delivers the best performance, without forcing clients to manage multiple integrations.”
Irrevocable rails and rising fraud risk
As speed increases, so does risk. Irrevocable payments leave little room for error, and authorised push payment fraud and first-party abuse remain persistent concerns for regulators and institutions alike.
Moncrieff is clear that fraud prevention cannot rely on a single control. Visa Direct’s risk approach is layered, combining pre-transaction checks such as beneficiary verification with behavioural and device signals, velocity and amount controls, and adaptive risk scoring at origination. Where risk signals warrant it, targeted step-ups are introduced, but blanket friction is avoided.
“Preventing fraud and driving integrity is our top priority,” he says. “The challenge is doing that without undermining the user experience that real-time payments promise.”
Speed without outrunning compliance
The same balance applies to financial crime controls. While Visa Direct provides a compliance framework and tools including sanctions screening on certain transactions, transaction limits within VisaNet, optional screening scores for cross-border outbound transfers and consolidated AML reporting, Moncrieff is careful to draw a line around responsibility.
“The actual AML compliance, including real-time screening, sits primarily with the issuing financial institution or programme provider,” he says.
Visa’s role, instead, is to enhance data quality and analysis, increasingly through AI-driven tools, so that screening decisions can be made with greater confidence and fewer false positives. In a world where payments move in seconds, poor data is no longer just an operational inconvenience; it becomes a risk in its own right.
Liquidity is another area where real-time expectations collide with financial reality. Fast payouts require funds to be available when and where they are needed, and in a higher interest rate environment, the opportunity cost of pre-funding has become harder to ignore.
Moncrieff acknowledges liquidity optimisation is an increasing burden for payers and institutions. However, he notes this pressure can be mitigated through net-settlement compression where trust controls allow it.
Visa Direct’s focus here falls into three areas. The first is core optimisation, working with clients to limit pre-funding requirements through scale and treasury efficiency. The second is forecasting, using data to anticipate payout demand and position liquidity in advance. The third is experimentation with new settlement tools.
“We are working on launching several stablecoin-enabled pilots,” Moncrieff says, including pilots focused on pre-funding and just-in-time funding.
Stablecoins with guardrails
Stablecoins are often discussed in ideological terms, but Visa Direct’s approach is more pragmatic. Moncrieff describes recent announcements around both pre-funding and payouts pilots, while emphasising the guardrails that sit around any deployment.
Only regulated instruments are supported, partners must be licensed, programmes must align fully with applicable laws and regulations, and controls such as programme-level limits and audit-grade reporting are non-negotiable.
The positioning is telling. Stablecoins are framed not as a replacement for existing rails, but as an additional tool within a broader FX and liquidity toolkit, applied where they can demonstrably improve efficiency without introducing new systemic risks.
Data as infrastructure
For many clients, data has become the true differentiator in cross-border payments. Richer information improves reconciliation, reduces exceptions, and supports better risk decisions. Visa Direct’s investments here are focused on making ISO 20022 data genuinely useful, rather than simply compliant.
This includes ISO 20022-native message enrichment across outbound and account funding flows, with richer remittance and reference data, as well as programme-level AML data consolidation and corridor readiness dashboards that allow product teams to adjust routing quickly. Rolling API updates expose new reporting fields as they are released, rather than bundling changes into infrequent platform upgrades.
Responsible data use, Moncrieff stresses, is as important as data availability. Transparency must improve without compromising privacy or regulatory obligations.
As platform strategies evolve, so too do questions about where large networks draw the line between enabling partners and competing with them. Moncrieff’s answer is consistent with the “network of networks” framing.
“Visa brings the rails, the risk and the data,” he says. “Our partners bring distribution, local connectivity and customer experience.”
