{"id":137576,"date":"2025-11-17T07:26:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T07:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/137576\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T07:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T07:26:09","slug":"visa-leans-into-ai-enabled-payments-and-stablecoins-to-stay-ahead-of-the-game-says-asia-pacific-president-stephen-karpin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/137576\/","title":{"rendered":"Visa leans into AI-enabled payments and stablecoins to stay ahead of the game, says Asia-Pacific president Stephen Karpin"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>\u2014skipping physical credit cards entirely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Traditional card companies are reinventing themselves to stay ahead of the game. \u201cThese days, when people talk about \u2018cards\u2019, it\u2019s not just a piece of plastic. It\u2019s a digital network proposition where you can pay or be paid,\u201d Stephen Karpin, Visa\u2019s Asia-Pacific president, told Fortune on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, on the sidelines of the Singapore FinTech Festival, Visa<\/a> revealed two new features for its regional clientele: AI-enabled payments and stablecoin settlements.<\/p>\n

The first marks the company\u2019s expansion into agentic commerce<\/a>, where consumers across Asia can tap on AI-powered agents to shop and pay on their behalf.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s release of ChatGPT catalyzed a fundamental shift in commerce, Karpin said. \u201cThe breadth with which it\u2019s 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This means that online shoppers can use AI chatbots to discover, browse and select items\u2014but can\u2019t yet use them to complete payments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Customers can load their Visa cards on an agent system\u2014just as they might with Apple<\/a> or Google<\/a> Pay. They are then given the option to opt in for \u2018personalization\u2019, to receive recommendations of \u201cintelligent shopping decisions\u201d based on their past preferences.<\/p>\n

Users are then prompted to make payment within the AI platform\u2014securely, with tokenization and authentication\u2014completing an end-to-end online shopping process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stablecoins<\/p>\n

The second initiative is Visa\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u200b\u200bWe want to make [stablecoins] one of the options to make and receive payments all around the world, when the regulatory environment is ready,\u201d Karpin added. \u201cWe\u2019ve got some assets in the form of technology and capability, and want to help businesses large and small start conducting commerce in Web3.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asia\u2019s shifting payments space<\/p>\n

Karpin has worked at Visa for over a decade, cutting his teeth in the South Pacific, Southeast Asian, and Japanese markets\u2014before becoming the firm\u2019s Asia-Pacific president in 2023.<\/p>\n

Things are shifting in Asia\u2019s payments space, he said, noting that more change has happened in the last five years as compared to the previous fifty.<\/p>\n

Super apps\u2014single apps consolidating multiple services like ride-hailing, food delivery and digital payments\u2014is one such disruptor, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They first took off in mainland China, with the founding of Alipay in 2004 and WeChat Pay in 2013<\/a>. Southeast Asian tech giant Grab followed suit, launching GrabPay in 2016.<\/p>\n

But instead of regarding super apps and e-wallets as competition, Visa is looking for ways to work with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can live your life on a super app now, so we\u2019re partnering with them to digitalize the Visa credential,\u201d Karpin said.<\/p>\n

He cited Visa\u2019s partnership with Taiwan\u2019s Line Pay as an example, which allows Taiwanese users to travel abroad and pay by scanning any QR codes connected to the Visa network.<\/p>\n

Visa is also widely accepted in global destinations beyond Asia, making it easier for long-distance travelers to make seamless payments overseas.<\/p>\n

\u201c[When traveling further abroad], you can\u2019t use a super app with a QR. We\u2019re partnering with e-wallets so you can use your phone to tap to get onto the New York subway, or buy lunch in London,\u201d Karpin said.<\/p>\n

Visa is the world\u2019s 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\u2019s UnionPay in 2015. Yet Visa, No. 127 on the Fortune 500, leads in global transaction volume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Societies are shifting away from cash, and embracing new ways to make payments and transfer money. In Asia,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,73782,85,46,2687,125,2692],"class_list":{"0":"post-137576","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-fortune-500-companies","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-payments","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-visa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}