Visa expands stablecoin settlement, partners with OpenAI

At its annual payments forum on Wednesday, Visa announced an expansion of stablecoin settlement pilots and a partnership with OpenAI to enable AI agents to initiate tokenized Visa payments under user-defined controls. The company reported an annualized run rate of $7 billion in stablecoin flows through VisaNet as of March 2026.

Visa said the stablecoin pilots will broaden across regions, multiple blockchains and different currencies after moving billions of dollars through its network. Issuing banks are already settling onchain seven days a week with Visa, and the firm is working to extend seven-day settlement to acquirers to increase settlement frequency across the ecosystem.

On tokenization, Visa plans to build a technology layer for tokenized deposits that lets banks convert traditional deposits into programmable, always-on digital money while keeping funds on their balance sheets. The company plans to add richer token metadata to show more detail about transaction types and token location. A new token assurance signal will evaluate token use through its lifecycle and generate a trust score for each transaction to give issuers stronger signals for authorization decisions and help merchants reduce false declines.

Visa introduced tools aimed at transactions initiated by software agents, which the company calls agentic commerce. The firm launched Agent Score to help merchants judge whether AI agents can navigate and complete tasks on their sites, and an Agentic Directory as a verified registry of approved agents and merchants. Visa also unveiled a Large Transaction Model, an AI system trained on billions of transactions to improve fraud detection, boost authorization performance and lower false declines.

The OpenAI agreement will let developers and merchants accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents under controls set by users. Controls can include spending limits, merchant restrictions and approval requirements. Payments in these environments will use tokenized Visa credentials backed by real-time authorization and fraud monitoring. Visa said the integration is expected to support developer-focused applications, including Codex-based workflows and other automated and conversational commerce use cases.

Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, addressed the forum and commented on the company’s strategy: “AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end. Visa's role is to enable it to work securely, reliably and at global scale, for every participant in the ecosystem.”

Visa did not provide a timetable for a wider rollout of the OpenAI integration beyond developer and pilot phases, nor did it name which additional blockchains or currencies will join the settlement pilots.