Visa is deploying capital across three distinct growth vectors beyond its core card network: stablecoin infrastructure, issuer processing and fraud prevention. The moves, detailed on the company’s most recent earnings call, are reflected in its value-added services segment, which grew 34% in the latest quarter to $3.8 billion, representing close to a third of Visa’s $11.6 billion in total quarterly revenue.
Stablecoins and processing
On stablecoins, chief executive Ryan McInerney confirmed the company is investing across the full stack. Visa has joined Open Standard, a consortium of more than 140 firms planning to issue a token called Open USD, and has launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform, which enables banks and fintechs to mint, redeem and move stablecoins and provides on-chain wallet infrastructure. The company already powers more than 160 stablecoin card programmes and supports settlement in stablecoins across nine blockchains.
The processing story centres on Pismo, a cloud-native core banking and issuer processing platform that Visa acquired for $1 billion in 2023. Since that deal closed, Visa has expanded Pismo into 19 new markets. In April, Wells Fargo agreed to migrate to Pismo’s core account ledger as part of a core banking modernisation, a significant customer win for a platform that competes with deeply entrenched legacy systems.
Visa is now combining Pismo with its Visa DPS unit to create a product called DPS Full Service Credit, an integrated debit and credit issuer processing offering aimed at fintechs and smaller banks. The product is due to pilot in the fourth quarter of 2026 with a first US client already signed, before a general release in 2027. DPS currently processes more than half of Visa’s US debit volume. Adding credit processing puts Visa in direct competition with Fiserv and FIS, the latter of which spent $13.5 billion in January buying Global Payments’ issuer business to become the largest US credit card processor.
Fraud and behavioural intelligence
On fraud, Visa has made two significant moves in quick succession. It closed the acquisition of Featurespace in December 2024, reportedly for around $925 million. Featurespace provides real-time transaction scoring and counts HSBC, NatWest, Worldpay and Danske Bank among its clients.
This week the company agreed to acquire BioCatch, an Israeli behavioural biometrics firm, for $2.4 billion in cash. BioCatch monitors more than 3,000 signals during a session, including keystroke timing, touch gestures, device orientation and whether an AI agent is driving activity. The two acquisitions are positioned as complementary: transaction scoring addresses payment-level anomalies, while behavioural intelligence addresses account takeover and authorised push payment scams, where the legitimate account holder initiates the transaction themselves. Visa estimates that account takeovers and scams cost the global economy more than $1 trillion annually.
Competitive read-across
The strategic logic running through all three vectors is the same: Visa is converting its network position and balance sheet into infrastructure businesses that generate recurring revenue independent of interchange. That matters because regulatory pressure on interchange, particularly in the EU and increasingly in the UK, has long been flagged as a structural risk to the card network model.
In stablecoins, Visa is positioning ahead of MiCA implementation in the EU and equivalent frameworks elsewhere, aiming to be the settlement and orchestration layer for institutional stablecoin flows rather than a bystander to them. In processing, the Pismo-DPS combination directly challenges the legacy core-banking vendors, many of which are mid-modernisation themselves. In fraud, the BioCatch acquisition reflects a market shift following the UK’s mandatory reimbursement rules for authorised push payment fraud, which have raised the commercial stakes for accurate behavioural detection across the payments stack.
The open question is execution across three simultaneous platform bets, each requiring different technical, regulatory and commercial capabilities.
The post Visa Bets on Stablecoins, Processing and Fraud Detection appeared first on The Fintech Times.
