Visa announced plans for tokenized deposits and new token assurance features designed to support AI-driven and programmable commerce, according to remarks by Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa, during the company’s annual payments forum on Wednesday.
The expansion marks Visa’s deepest integration yet into stablecoin infrastructure and agentic commerce. Stablecoins moved through VisaNet reached a $7 billion annualized run rate as of March 2026, up from billions of dollars historically processed across the network.
“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,” Forestell said.
Tokenized Deposits and Settlement Expansion
Tokenized deposits will allow banks to convert traditional deposits into programmable digital money while keeping funds on their balance sheets. Visa is extending seven-day onchain settlement, already operational between issuing banks and Visa, to include acquirers.
The token assurance signal evaluates token use throughout its lifecycle to generate a trust score for each transaction. This feature is designed to reduce fraud and increase merchant confidence in stablecoin and tokenized asset acceptance.
AI Commerce Infrastructure
Visa introduced two new tools for merchants and developers navigating agentic commerce. Agent Score allows merchants to evaluate whether AI agents can navigate and complete tasks on their websites. The Agentic Directory serves as a verified registry of agents and merchants approved by Visa as legitimate participants in agentic commerce.
The Large Transaction Model, trained on billions of transactions, is designed to improve fraud detection while increasing authorization performance and reducing false declines. The model supports real-time evaluation of high-value and complex transactions initiated by AI systems.
OpenAI Partnership and AI-Initiated Payments
Visa’s partnership with OpenAI enables developers and merchants to accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents under user-defined controls including spending limits, merchant restrictions, and approval requirements. Payments in the partnership will use tokenized Visa credentials alongside real-time authorization and fraud monitoring.
The integration allows users to authorize AI systems to initiate transactions on their behalf within predefined parameters, addressing a key friction point in agentic commerce adoption. Visa did not specify a launch date for the OpenAI integration or which applications will be prioritized in initial rollout.
Stablecoin Settlement Pilots
Visa is expanding stablecoin settlement pilots across its network. The company did not specify which regions, blockchains, or currencies are included in the expanded pilots, nor did it name specific banks or acquirers participating in current settlement operations.
The moves position Visa as infrastructure for both traditional finance tokenization and AI-native commerce workflows. Forestell’s framing suggests Visa sees stablecoins and AI agents as complementary layers: stablecoins as the settlement rails, AI agents as the transaction initiators, and Visa’s token assurance and fraud tools as the trust layer binding them together.
