Visa Inc. Class A

Mastercard is expanding Agent Pay with new trust and intelligence services designed to help banks and merchants assess AI-led transactions more accurately. The first tool, now entering U.S. testing, assigns a probability score indicating whether a transaction was initiated by an AI agent, and over time the score will incorporate more data to help banks and merchants make better-informed approval decisions. Industry projections cited in the announcement suggest that one in 10 consumers could routinely use AI agents to make purchases by 2030, and as AI agents buy across multiple merchants their activity may look different from typical human transactions, raising the risk that legitimate purchases are flagged as suspicious. Partnerships with Cloudflare and Skyfire could provide more information to identify trusted agents and confirm the purpose of transactions, while using identity, fraud and transaction data could help Mastercard improve payment security and reduce unnecessary declines. The near-term earnings impact is likely limited, but the longer-term opportunity is clearer, as better transaction decisions could reduce legitimate purchase declines and support payment volume growth. Competitors are building similar infrastructure: Visa's Intelligent Commerce portfolio includes Agent Scoring, an Agentic Registry and a Trusted Agent Protocol, while PayPal is taking a more merchant-focused approach that lets AI agents discover products, manage shopping carts and complete purchases across online stores.

Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK for up to $1.8 billion on August 3, 2026, more than double the London-based fiat-to-stablecoin payments firm's $750 million valuation from its December 2024 Series B. The deal follows Stripe's $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge in late 2024, and in June 2026 a consortium of more than 140 companies including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and BlackRock unveiled Open USD, a stablecoin whose news sent Circle's stock down 17% that day. Visa, which had used BVNK as a stablecoin settlement partner before losing it to Mastercard, issued an RFP on August 18 for a replacement licensed in the US, Canada, UK and Singapore, and Visa Ventures invested $10 million in London startup Velocity as a $10 million add-on to its Series A, bringing the total to $48 million, while Visa's stablecoin settlement run rate roughly doubled to about $7 billion annualized by its fiscal second quarter. On September 30, 2026, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority opened its authorisation gateway for cryptoasset firms including stablecoin issuers, with applications running through February 28, 2027 and full enforcement set for October 25, 2027, while in the US seven agencies missed their one-year rulemaking deadline for the GENIUS Act on July 18, 2026, leaving only NPRMs published ahead of a January 18, 2027 effective date. HSBC's HKD stablecoin RedCoin, distributed through its 3.3 million-user PayMe app, along with Citi's partnership with Coinbase and Circle's work with Volante on USDC settlement, point to infrastructure consolidation rather than open experimentation.

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa have announced a collaboration on a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework designed to streamline agent onboarding and identification across card networks, digital wallet ecosystems and agent platforms. The framework relies on shared principles while allowing each network to maintain its own verification and decisioning processes, a step the article calls critical as AI agents and automated payment workflows expand. For Mastercard and Visa, the partnership is meant to reinforce network scale and transaction growth by embedding their infrastructure into emerging AI agent ecosystems and cross-border digital wallets, while also creating a tailwind for their value-added services such as identity verification, cyber risk management, fraud decisioning and security tools. The article cautions that integrating the framework carries execution and margin challenges, requiring sustained technology and integration spending at a time when operating expenses and client incentive pressures are already elevated, with rising rebates and promotional spend potentially compressing net take rates. It adds that both companies face revenue growth deceleration relative to historical double-digit rates, alongside moderately higher leverage and cash flow moderation, leaving near-term benefits conditional on managing implementation costs without sacrificing profitability.

Federal Reserve Vice Chair of Supervision Michelle Bowman is working to secure the banking system against AI-related risks, partnering with Visa and MasterCard to guard against potential cyberattacks. Bowman said the largest banks can use the technology and mitigate its risks, but smaller institutions, especially community banks, need closer scrutiny. She is working with service providers to ensure they test technology shared with smaller banks so it does not carry vulnerabilities that could harm end consumers. Separately, Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin said the supply shocks from tariffs and higher oil prices, layered on top of inflation that has stayed above the Fed's 2% target for more than five years, are not proving short-lived, which is why the Fed opted to hike rates last week. Barkin pointed to the possibility of more tariffs, the protracted conflict in the Middle East and the continuing AI buildout pressuring supply chains, and while he did not say how many more rate hikes might come, he left the door open to them.

Alchemy has integrated AgentCard with Mastercard Agent Pay, establishing a dedicated identity layer that gives each autonomous AI agent its own email address, phone number, stablecoin wallet, and tokenized payment credentials. The integration adds Verifiable Intent, a standard co-developed with Google that provides tamper-resistant cryptographic proof linking a consumer's specific instructions to a transaction outcome, with selective disclosure of only the minimum required information at checkout. AgentCard originally launched in June 2026 with Visa Intelligent Commerce, and setup now takes a single command-line instruction and under one minute, with credentials encrypted at rest and granular controls including merchant category restrictions, geographic limits, and instant freeze-or-revoke. Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan said AI agents are moving from simple assistants to software that can take action, while Mastercard EVP of Digital Commercialization Sherri Haymond said the future of commerce is about agents that can be trusted to act on your behalf. The infrastructure push comes as only 3% of transactions involve agents and developers face integration costs of $5,000 to $500,000 per protocol, while Visa completed hundreds of secure agent transactions in a closed beta and projects millions by holiday 2026. Structural obstacles remain: only 23% of consumers trust AI to handle payments and 85% demand transparency on data use, 90% of executives express confidence in their visibility over AI usage while only 11% of applications are visible to IT departments, and 93% of merchants believe the AI provider should bear the financial risk of transactions.

Mastercard is positioning itself beyond payments with a new Collection for Business offering, citing survey findings that small businesses prioritize stability and integrated tools. Its Dreamonomics survey of more than 6,000 SMEs across 18 countries found that 68% prioritize stability and predictability over rapid growth, while 54% avoid unnecessary financial risk, and 61% favor deeper customer relationships over simply reaching more buyers. The new Collection for Business combines payment capabilities with productivity tools, travel and lifestyle benefits, cybersecurity support and business-focused experiences for eligible cardholders. Mastercard sees clear gaps: SMEs already rely on five digital tools on average, yet 89% intend to add more and 78% say integrated tools are critical, while 71% consider cyber protection a priority but only 37% currently use cybersecurity tools. Rival Visa launched its Visa & Main platform with a $100 million working-capital facility, and American Express offers its Business Blueprint, as Mastercard shares have lost 0.5% year to date compared with the broader industry's 11.2% decline.

Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements, or BIS, found that estimates of the value transferred on the Bitcoin blockchain can differ by as much as sixfold depending on how transactions are measured. The discrepancy stems from Bitcoin's transaction structure, in which unspent funds are often returned to the sender as change and counted as another transaction output even though no value was actually sent to anyone else. The measurement problem also extends to Bitcoin's market value, where traditional measures have run as much as four times higher than Realized Capitalization. The study drew on 100 billion blockchain records covering Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron. On Ethereum, of roughly 67.5 million smart contracts that saw actual use, about 54 million could not be classified. USDT on Ethereum is more closely tied to DeFi activity, while USDT on Tron is more associated with payments and store-of-value use. The share of USDT held by smart contracts on Ethereum once exceeded 20% in 2022, compared with about 1% on Tron. The BIS researchers concluded that on-chain indicators should be viewed as highly volatile estimates rather than direct measures of economic activity. Meanwhile, Visa's Onchain Analytics dashboard, powered by data from Allium Labs, showed total stablecoin transaction volume of 6.4 trillion dollars across the networks it tracks over the past 30 days, against an adjusted volume of 313.1 billion dollars.

PayPal is positioning agentic payments as a long-term growth opportunity, with management expecting the technology to become increasingly meaningful from 2028 onward, though it is not expected to materially contribute to near-term results. The company believes agentic payments can help it monetize its established wallet, merchant infrastructure, identity, risk capabilities and two-sided network, but has not provided specific revenue or transaction forecasts for the business. PayPal's existing scale backs the opportunity: in the second quarter of 2026, total payment volume reached $486.4 billion, payment transactions came in at 6.75 billion, and active accounts stood at 439 million. Agentic payments are not PayPal's primary near-term growth driver, as financial services, Venmo, Braintree and improved checkout execution remain more immediate priorities amid subdued branded checkout growth. Competitors are moving too, with Visa building Visa Intelligent Commerce and partnering with OpenAI in June 2026, and Mastercard advancing Mastercard Agent Pay and expanding it with Agent Pay for Machines in June 2026. PayPal shares have gained 26.5% over the past three months, and the stock trades at a forward 12-month P/E of 9.46X versus the Zacks Financial Transaction Services industry's 17.70X.