Visa's Value-Added Services Grow Over 20% as It Pushes Beyond Payments

Visa's issuing, acceptance, and risk and security businesses are each growing more than 20%, and the company expects similar growth in fiscal 2027 after collectively passing that mark in fiscal 2026. Andrew Torre, Visa's president of value-added services, laid out the numbers at a recent event — and they frame a company steadily selling more than payment rails.

Torre said Visa launched more than 350 products, features and services during the year, a 25% increase from the prior year. Roughly 60% of its developers and product teams have adopted artificial intelligence tools to build prototypes and write code, with human supervision, he said.

How far beyond payments do the services reach?

The common goal across the portfolio, Torre said, is helping clients improve performance — whether through issuing, acceptance, risk products or advisory work. While Visa has traditionally supported its own network, it increasingly serves other payment types and activities beyond payments entirely.

One example: Visa extended its fraud scoring (the system that rates each transaction's likelihood of being fraudulent) to non-Visa transactions. After a pilot with a client in the United Arab Emirates, the service now covers almost 400 million transactions.

The distribution engine behind that is substantial:

• 14,000 financial institution partners
• 450 specialized value-added-services sellers, working alongside account executives and sales engineers
• 40 advisory engagements completed in fiscal 2026, a number Visa wants to more than double

Torre described one engagement with an Asian client where Visa helped improve card benefits and address transaction declines while spotting cross-sell opportunities. In short: the services business is no longer a bolt-on to the network.

What is Pismo doing for banks' legacy problem?

Visa acquired Pismo, a cloud-based processing platform, to answer client complaints about costly, complex legacy technology and slow time-to-market. The platform supports debit, credit and commercial processing across 28 markets, and clients can test individual use cases rather than migrating everything at once.

Torre cited Westpac as a processing win and Wells Fargo as a core banking win using Pismo's ledger (the record-keeping layer that tracks account balances and transactions). He expects banks' shift off legacy core systems to play out over the next five to 10 years — though institutions must weigh transformation costs carefully.

Why did Visa start charging for tokens?

In acceptance, Torre said Visa wants to move from approximately 60% token penetration in e-commerce to 100%. Tokens (digital substitutes for card numbers that shield the real credentials) deliver an approximately 5% uplift in approval rates and cut fraud by about 35%.

Visa began pricing tokens in April after years of giving them away. A separate digital commerce authentication program, designed to encourage tokenization and data sharing, is producing a 300-basis-point lift (three percentage points) — above Visa's initial expectation of 100 to 200 basis points. Torre offered no target date for full tokenization.

Where are the next opportunities?

Torre called cybersecurity a top-three client issue. Visa has commercialized its threat intelligence platform with embedded AI, announced a partnership and small investment in Overwatch — whose technology gathers dark web data — and has announced an acquisition of BioCatch for behavioral identity capabilities. The BioCatch deal has not closed. Visa also sells tools that help clients manage transaction risk and keep authorization services running during outages.

Looking ahead, Torre pointed to stablecoins and agentic commerce (transactions carried out by AI agents on a customer's behalf). Pismo already supports stablecoin payments for issuer Gnosis Pay, and Visa plans to integrate Pismo with its stablecoin platform. Clients in multiple markets want to test Visa Intelligent Commerce, the agentic-transactions platform — though he gave no revenue timeline.

The takeaway: Visa is monetizing security, software and advice on top of the network — and pricing tokens for the first time to make that growth pay.