Visa used the run-up to its Payments Forum in Paris to lay out a two-track strategy for the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa region: let artificial intelligence handle the front end of a transaction, and let stablecoins handle what happens after.
The announcements, shared June 30 ahead of the July 1 forum, amount to a bet that the next wave of commerce growth will come from machines transacting on people’s behalf and from bank settlement systems that increasingly resemble crypto rails.
Both shifts are already showing up in Visa’s numbers, though the company is the one supplying them.
AI Agents Get a Trust Layer
Visa’s pitch centers on Visa Intelligent Commerce, its platform for what it calls agentic commerce — transactions initiated not by a person tapping a card but by an AI agent acting on a consumer’s behalf.
The company is rolling out two new tools to make that plausible: Agent Score, built with New Generation, which lets merchants check whether their websites are navigable by AI agents at all, and Agentic Directory, a vetted list of agents and merchants meant to reassure each side that the other is legitimate.
The underlying problem is straightforward. If software is going to buy things without a human clicking “confirm,” merchants need assurance the agent isn’t fraudulent, and agents need assurance the merchant is real. Visa is positioning itself as the referee for that handshake — a role that also happens to reinforce its position at the center of the transaction, regardless of who or what initiates it.
Tokenization’s Steep Climb
The more concrete data point in Visa’s announcement is tokenization — the practice of replacing card numbers with unique digital identifiers for each transaction. In the CEMEA region, tokenized transactions have grown from 26 percent in 2023 to 70 percent in 2026, according to Visa.
That is a striking jump, though Visa did not break out how much of the increase reflects organic merchant adoption versus its own push to make tokenization the default across issuing banks. The company says it is now enriching token data with more context — transaction type, channel, payer identity — and adding a “token assurance signal” that scores trust based on a token’s provisioning and behavioral history.
In practice, that means Visa is building a running credit-score-like signal for every digital credential in the system, a capability that becomes more valuable to Visa the more commerce shifts toward automated, non-human initiated payments.
Stablecoins Move From Pilot to Scale
On the settlement side, Visa disclosed that stablecoin settlement volumes in CEMEA have increased nearly 60-fold in the year since the capability launched in the region. Globally, the company says it has moved billions of dollars in stablecoins across VisaNet, with an annualized run rate of roughly $7 billion as of March 2026 — up from pilots that began in early 2025.
Visa is also introducing Tokenized Deposits, a technology layer that would let banks convert ordinary deposits into programmable digital money without moving them off balance sheet. The framing is telling: banks get stablecoin-like speed while avoiding the deposit flight that fully embracing public stablecoins could invite. Visa is effectively offering banks a way to compete with stablecoins by borrowing their technical advantages.
The company says issuing banks already settle onchain with Visa seven days a week, and it is working to extend that cadence to acquirers as well. More than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs are now live or in development globally, letting consumers spend stablecoin balances anywhere Visa cards are accepted.
What the Numbers Don’t Show
Visa’s disclosures are notable for their scale but thin on independent verification — the tokenization and settlement figures come entirely from Visa’s own reporting, with no third-party audit referenced.
The 60-fold increase in CEMEA stablecoin settlement, for instance, says nothing about the base volume it started from, which could make a dramatic percentage change look more significant than the absolute dollar figures would suggest.
There’s also a structural point worth flagging: nearly every capability Visa announced — agent verification, token scoring, stablecoin settlement, deposit tokenization — deepens the case for the underlying VisaNet plumbing, even as the announcement is framed as ecosystem infrastructure rather than a proprietary Visa product.
As banks, merchants and fintechs across the region weigh whether to build atop these tools or seek more open, blockchain-native alternatives, the value of the actual transaction data — who is verified, who is trusted, who gets a favorable token assurance score — will remain squarely under Visa’s control.
Rolling Out Trip Intelligence
Alongside the AI and stablecoin news, Visa is launching Trip Intelligence in CEMEA, a tool that combines VisaNet transaction data with third-party sources to predict when a customer is about to travel and generate personalized itineraries for partner banks to act on.
It’s a smaller announcement, but it fits the same pattern: Visa turning the data that flows through its network into a product it can sell back to the banks that generate it.
