Societies are shifting away from cash, and embracing new ways to make payments and transfer money. In Asia, many have turned to e-wallets, QR codes, and super apps—skipping physical credit cards entirely.
Traditional card companies are reinventing themselves to stay ahead of the game. “These days, when people talk about ‘cards’, it’s not just a piece of plastic. It’s a digital network proposition where you can pay or be paid,” Stephen Karpin, Visa’s Asia-Pacific president, told Fortune on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, on the sidelines of the Singapore FinTech Festival, Visa revealed two new features for its regional clientele: AI-enabled payments and stablecoin settlements.
The first marks the company’s expansion into agentic commerce, where consumers across Asia can tap on AI-powered agents to shop and pay on their behalf.
OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT catalyzed a fundamental shift in commerce, Karpin said. “The breadth with which it’s transforming how one understands and finds things in the world is quite profound. Yet one of the things missing from the current state of a LLM-powered chatbot is the ability to make payment via an agent,” he said.
This means that online shoppers can use AI chatbots to discover, browse and select items—but can’t yet use them to complete payments.
Customers can load their Visa cards on an agent system—just as they might with Apple or Google Pay. They are then given the option to opt in for ‘personalization’, to receive recommendations of “intelligent shopping decisions” based on their past preferences.
Users are then prompted to make payment within the AI platform—securely, with tokenization and authentication—completing an end-to-end online shopping process.
Stablecoins
The second initiative is Visa’s stable settlement pilot, which enables select partners to pay using stablecoins across supported blockchains. Stablecoins are digital currencies designed to have a stable value, by pegging them to less volatile assets such as fiat currencies, most commonly the U.S. dollar).
Karpin said that Visa had recognized the value of blockchain technology for payments since the time first emerged a decade ago. Today, more cross-border transactions than ever are taking place via stablecoins.
“We want to make [stablecoins] one of the options to make and receive payments all around the world, when the regulatory environment is ready,” Karpin added. “We’ve got some assets in the form of technology and capability, and want to help businesses large and small start conducting commerce in Web3.”
Asia’s shifting payments space
Karpin has worked at Visa for over a decade, cutting his teeth in the South Pacific, Southeast Asian, and Japanese markets—before becoming the firm’s Asia-Pacific president in 2023.
Things are shifting in Asia’s payments space, he said, noting that more change has happened in the last five years as compared to the previous fifty.
Super apps—single apps consolidating multiple services like ride-hailing, food delivery and digital payments—is one such disruptor, he said.
They first took off in mainland China, with the founding of Alipay in 2004 and WeChat Pay in 2013. Southeast Asian tech giant Grab followed suit, launching GrabPay in 2016.
But instead of regarding super apps and e-wallets as competition, Visa is looking for ways to work with them.
“You can live your life on a super app now, so we’re partnering with them to digitalize the Visa credential,” Karpin said.
He cited Visa’s partnership with Taiwan’s Line Pay as an example, which allows Taiwanese users to travel abroad and pay by scanning any QR codes connected to the Visa network.
Visa is also widely accepted in global destinations beyond Asia, making it easier for long-distance travelers to make seamless payments overseas.
“[When traveling further abroad], you can’t use a super app with a QR. We’re partnering with e-wallets so you can use your phone to tap to get onto the New York subway, or buy lunch in London,” Karpin said.
Visa is the world’s second-largest card payment organization based on the annual value of card payments transacted and the number of issued cards, after being surpassed by China’s UnionPay in 2015. Yet Visa, No. 127 on the Fortune 500, leads in global transaction volume.