The Public Ledger: The Greatest Fintech Ever Built

Hello, Fintech Friends!

I was listening to Visa's earnings call over the weekend, and it reminded me why I think Visa is probably the greatest fintech ever built.

Visa started as BankAmericard in 1958 and now has 5 billion payment credentials, 175 million seller locations across more than 200 countries, and nearly 14,500 financial institutions as its clients. Last year it processed almost $17 trillion in payments volume. Connecting merchants and consumers in nearly every country on earth is an achievement I have always admired.

What I find more impressive is how Visa keeps evolving beyond being a card network.

Let's start with stablecoins. "We are active and investing in each layer of the stablecoin stack from blockchain to issuance, wallets, infrastructure and orchestration and applications," CEO Ryan McInerney said on last week's earnings call.

Visa joined Open Standard, the consortium of more than 140 companies that plans to issue Open USD. It launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform, which lets banks and fintechs mint, redeem, and move stablecoins and gives them onchain wallet infrastructure.

Visa also powers more than 160 stablecoin card programs, and its clients can settle with Visa in stablecoins across nine blockchains.

The processing business is the part I think gets the least attention. Visa bought Pismo, a Brazilian cloud-native core banking and issuer processing platform, for $1 billion in 2023. Pismo runs debit, credit, commercial cards, and deposit accounts on one API-based platform, and Visa has taken it into 19 new markets since the deal closed.

In April, Visa said Wells Fargo agreed to migrate to Pismo's core account ledger as part of a core banking modernization. For anyone who follows this market, a bank that size moving its core ledger onto a platform Visa owns is a major win.

This quarter Visa said it is combining Pismo with Visa DPS into DPS Full Service Credit, an integrated debit and credit issuer processing product for fintechs and small and midsize banks. It pilots in the fourth quarter with a first US client already signed and goes generally available next year.

DPS is the leading debit issuer processor in the US, running more than half of Visa's US debit volume. Adding credit processing puts Visa against Fiserv and FIS, which spent $13.5 billion in January buying Global Payments' issuer business to become the largest US credit card processor.

Fraud is the third area. Visa closed its acquisition of Featurespace in December 2024, reportedly for about $925 million. Featurespace scores transactions in real time to catch fraud as it happens, with clients including HSBC, NatWest, Worldpay, and Danske Bank.

This week Visa agreed to buy BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash. The Israeli company reads how a person behaves rather than what they are paying for, tracking more than 3,000 signals in a session, including keystroke timing, mouse movement, touch gestures, how someone holds a phone, whether the device is jailbroken, and whether an AI agent is driving the session.

The two cover different parts of the same problem. Transaction scoring cannot catch a scam, where the customer authorizes the payment themselves. Account takeovers and scams cost the global economy more than $1 trillion a year, according to Visa's Andrew Torre.

Most of these new businesses sit in Visa's value-added services segment, which grew 34% in the latest quarter to $3.8 billion, close to a third of Visa's $11.6 billion in revenue.

Visa is an incumbent, and, in theory, incumbents lose the next cycle. I don't think that is the case with Visa. Twenty years from now it may not primarily be a card network, but I am fairly confident it will still be here.

Keep building, dear Visa team!

Jev Kazanins

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