Visa expands tokenized deposit infrastructure as stablecoin settlement hits about $7 billion on VisaNet

Visa is building infrastructure for tokenized deposits, giving banks a way to issue programmable digital assets backed by traditional deposits. For high-risk PSPs, the point is not the buzzword — it is the settlement plumbing: Visa is trying to make bank money behave more like stablecoin rails without forcing funds off balance sheet.

1. Visa said the new technology layer would let financial institutions turn bank deposits into tokenized assets with 24/7 programmable use. In practice, that means banks could offer customers the speed and flexibility usually associated with stablecoins while keeping the money inside the traditional banking system.
2. The company framed tokenized deposits as part of a broader push into blockchain technologies and stablecoins, with a focus on modernizing interbank settlement and capital movement infrastructure. Jack Forestell, Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Visa, said tokenized deposits could become a bridge between the traditional banking system and the blockchain economy, making existing financial processes compatible with programmable payments.
3. Visa also put numbers on its existing digital-asset activity. According to the company, annual stablecoin settlement volume through VisaNet reached about $7 billion as of March 2026. Issuing banks already use stablecoins for settlement through Visa seven days a week, and Visa said it is working to bring acquirers into the model as well.
4. Beyond settlement, Visa said it has launched or is developing more than 160 card programs linked to stablecoins. It also expanded the list of available blockchain networks, currencies, and regions within its stablecoin settlement pilots.
5. Separately, Visa introduced AI-related products and partnerships: Visa Intelligent Commerce for payments involving AI agents, Agent Score for assessing whether merchant websites are ready to interact with AI agents, Agentic Directory for verifying trusted AI agents and merchants, Large Transaction Model for fraud detection trained on billions of transactions, and a strategic partnership with OpenAI to integrate Visa’s payment infrastructure into agentic AI services.

Visa said its main priority is modernizing payment infrastructure without fully replacing existing banking systems. To do that, it is building cloud-based, modular solutions meant to work with banks, FinTech companies, acquirers, and merchants — which is the part PSPs will care about if they are deciding whether to plug into bank-backed tokenized settlement or stay with the usual rails.

In December 2025, Visa introduced Visa Consulting & Analytics, a consulting division offering a broad range of services in stablecoins.