Visa (NYSE:V) reported fourth-quarter financial results on Tuesday. This transcript is brought to you by Benzinga APIs.
com/attendee/402777985SummaryVisa Inc. Full TranscriptOPERATORWelcome to Visa’s fourth quarter and full year 2026 earnings conference call.
All participants are in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. Today’s conference is being recorded.
If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Ms.
Jennifer Comeo, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Investor Relations. Ms.
Jennifer Comeo (Senior Vice President and Global Head of Investor Relations)Thank you. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Visa’s fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 earnings call.
Joining us today are Ryan McInerney, Visa’s Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Suh, Visa’s Chief Financial Officer. com.
A replay will be archived on our site for 30 days. Let me also remind you that this presentation includes forward-looking statements.
These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and our actual results, outcomes, or timing could differ materially as a result of many factors. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any responsibility to update these forward-looking statements.
Our comments today regarding our financial results will reflect revenue on a GAAP basis and all other results on a non-GAAP, nominal basis, unless otherwise noted. The related GAAP measures and reconciliation are available in today’s earnings release and related materials available on our IR website.
Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)Thanks Jennifer. 2026 was a milestone year for Visa.
1 billion, up 13% year over year. This resulted in full-year record net revenue of $46 billion, up 15%, the strongest net revenue growth in over 15 years excluding the post-pandemic recovery and acquisitions.
Our drivers for the year were strong. Payments volume was up 9% year over year in constant dollars.
Commercial payments volume grew 12% for the year in constant dollars, faster than consumer and the fastest annual growth rate in eight years excluding the post-pandemic recovery. Total cross-border volume excluding intra-Europe rose 12% year over year, with travel up 11% and e-commerce up 15%, all in constant dollars.
While these numbers speak to our strengths in 2026, we also demonstrated that whenever technology changes commerce, we move with it. We anticipate what’s next and we enable its growth as the leading hyperscaler of payments globally.
The foundation of all of this is trust. Visa brings trust with our scale, our network and infrastructure, and our products, all delivered through our Visa as a Service stack.
Starting with scale, we have scale in issuance and acceptance. 2 billion credentials, up 6% year over year, with Latin America crossing the billionth credential milestone.
And we continued to grow our credentials globally in a number of ways. We signed new co-brand agreements and expanded existing relationships with marquee brands around the world.
S. S.
S. co-brands in the affluent space.
As part of an expanded relationship with Visa, our Flex credentials have tripled since last year with continued strength from existing players as well as growth from new partners such as Cash App and Chime. We will also soon be launching the world’s first stablecoin-linked Visa Flex credential with Norwegian Block Exchange, or NBX, in Europe.
Visa Pay, which connects wallets to any Visa-accepting seller worldwide, has nearly tripled its presence since last year to 11 countries. In commercial, we have over 15 new fleet clients this year across our five regions.
We recently renewed our global agreement with WEX to enable B2B travel and solutions for their corporate clients. S.
Across all of the credential growth we continue to drive adoption of tokens. Today, over 50% of all available credentials are tokenized, more than doubling from five years ago.
In 2026, we processed a tokenized transaction in 200 countries and territories for the first time, and now more than 60% of all e-commerce transactions are tokenized. On acceptance, we have well over 200 million seller locations, driven by a more than 40% increase in Brazil, more than 60% increase in Mexico, and a more than 15% increase in India seller locations year over year.
When we incorporate digital wallets, Visa credentials can be used at more than 200 million additional seller locations. , well on our way to the global total.
And for micro sellers in more emerging markets, we have Visa Accept, which has grown to 15 markets in just one year. Throughout all of these efforts, we are expanding our reach to power all types of payments: C2B, B2B, B2P, B2C, G2C and more.
In fact, we have the largest money movement platform on the planet with Visa Direct as measured by transactions, volumes and accounts, with more than 18 billion endpoints across cards, accounts and wallets, up from 12 billion in 2025. A recent example of a client adding new use cases is Navy Federal, who we have already partnered with on cross-border remittances.
And as part of a broader renewal across consumer and commercial portfolios and VAS, including DPS, they are positioning Visa Direct to support a number of new domestic money movement use cases over time. With our credentials, acceptance and our reach, Visa has and will continue to bring scale to the ecosystem.
You see this play out across our more than 200 countries and territories. For example, in Asia Pacific in 2026 we renewed and expanded with three of the top four Australian banks, three of the top four Indian banks, two of the top four Chinese banks, initiated new relationships with Japanese clients such as PayPay and Travel Wallet Japan.
Visa also delivers trust through our network and infrastructure. Over the last five years we have invested $15 billion in our network security and resilience, all to provide that six nines of reliability, always-on capability that you expect from Visa.
We also made progress this year building the next generation of VisaNet to enable the future of commerce through a cloud-native, microservices, distributed modular architecture that uses open languages and technologies, enabling easy scaling and configuration and faster feature deployment. An important area of future development will be mainland China, as Visa has received approval of our application to prepare from the People’s Bank of China.
This significant milestone now marks the beginning of our formal preparations to ultimately process domestically on the Visa network. Another core aspect of our network and infrastructure is enabling new capabilities, including blockchain.
In 2026 we gained even greater conviction in the opportunity and benefits of extending our network on-chain. Our vision is simple: one network combining fiat, stablecoins and tokenized deposits with interoperability and utility across our infrastructure, bringing the same ease and trust clients expect from Visa.
, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Switzerland and the UK, with additional countries to follow, and the pipeline has more than 300 partners. And the engagement we are seeing in our more established stablecoin offerings is significant.
In stablecoin settlement, our run rate has surpassed $25 billion in annualized volume, up 10x year over year. In consulting, with over 60 unique engagements, stablecoin advisory was our fastest growing Visa Consulting & Analytics practice this year, with nearly half of these projects in Q4 alone, and it continues to be among the top three focus areas for our clients alongside AI and cybersecurity.
That is trust at scale, and the trust that the Visa network and infrastructure represent is only amplified by the products we provide on top of it. I spoke last quarter about the fundamental changes to the way that we build and ship products enabled by utilizing our JET toolchain.
For example, the Visa stablecoin platform enablement for OUSD was designed, built and shipped in seven weeks with 12 people. Today, more than 60% of our global product development and engineering teams have adopted this new way of working, with the intent of reaching 100% this year.
One of the key areas of innovation for Visa has been empowering agentic commerce. It is clear that in agentic, trust is the big barrier to scale.
We believe the best way to break through that barrier is with one simple but powerful idea: every time someone pays or gets paid, it’s with a Visa credential. And as we look at the albeit limited number of agentic transactions today, Visa credentials are being used by consumers, businesses and agents.
We are also collaborating with Anthropic to bring their commerce blueprints to our merchants, combining the intelligence of Claude with the trust, security and global reach of the Visa network. One of the areas we identified for fast adoption of agentic has been B2B, and we have had several partners launch and expand offerings.
Ramp’s agentic bill pay use case is now generally available, and as Ramp businesses use Visa Intelligent Commerce to automate bill payments, payment volume is growing. Airwallex is testing Visa Intelligent Commerce-enabled credentials and integrating them into their native wallet.
Supplier portal will identify the agent and accept payment. Our Visa Intelligent Commerce solution is enabling all of this.
It provides trust for the user with credentials, agentic tokens and transaction identifiers; trust for the agent, trusted agent protocol and agent directory; and trust for the transaction. And of course, like on any Visa transaction, our rules clarify the roles and responsibilities and processes should something go wrong.
It is clear that agentic commerce is here and Visa is delivering trust. Another important area of product development has been in our value added services.
In fiscal 2026, our VAS business grew revenue 30% in constant dollars to $14 billion, essentially double our 2023 VAS revenue. I’ll go deeper into each one.
First, transactions, cards and accounts have driven the vast majority of our VAS revenue, more than 80% over the last five years, and that will continue as our clients grow, we expand to new clients and develop new products, and we’re able to price those products to value. Our success has enabled us to sell more products fueled by these underlying drivers.
Now to demand: cyber-related products are a top priority for our clients. We offer many end-to-end cyber solutions, including several launched this year, and we will continue to invest more over time.
The associated revenue spans across the VAS portfolios and represents a meaningful amount of total VAS revenue. In threat intelligence, our Visa Threat Intelligence platform combines cyber, fraud, brand identity and financial crime insights through high-fidelity feeds.
We connect these indicators to potential fraud outcomes to help our clients defend against would-be attackers. We also recently invested in Overwatch Data, a financial threat intelligence company whose solutions we will soon be offering to our clients globally.
In identity, access and behavioral trust, our authentication and tokenization platforms protect consumer credentials, payment transactions and merchants’ and acquirers’ sensitive data, and we are excited about our pending acquisition of BioCatch, a leading provider of behavioral-first, multi-signal fraud intelligence. In transaction intelligence, we are enhancing our scaled transaction risk services like Visa Advanced Authorization and Visa Decision Manager with our large transaction model, and our Featurespace solution offers clients a flexible platform to integrate a wide range of risk signals to enrich risk decisions throughout the consumer journey.
And in recovery and resilience, Smarter Stand-In Processing enables clients to deliver seamless, resilient transaction authorization services, and the newly launched Visa Intelligent Authorization empowers acquirers with advanced processing, payment orchestration, risk settings and real-time data across multiple local and global payment methods. Of course this list is not exhaustive.
Our advisory and other capabilities had significant revenue growth this year, with successful activation around the Olympics and FIFA and also around other sponsorships in sports and music and our other highly valued consulting engagements. These underlying set of assets and capabilities in this portfolio will drive strong revenue growth well into the future.
Across all our value added services, we have the people, technology, data, brand assets and reach that our customers are looking for. That is what drove the 30% VAS constant dollar revenue growth in 2026 and is why we expect strong VAS growth in the low to mid 20s in 2027.
2026 was a historic year for payments, and Visa only strengthened our positioning in the ecosystem as the leading hyperscaler of payments globally. With the increased utilization of AI across our business to deliver over 350 product releases, up 25% year over year, we reached new customers with Tap to Phone, Pismo, our B2B travel and fleet offerings, new affluent solutions, and cyber and risk capabilities like Featurespace and a TOA Protect.
We brought the best of Visa technology to the world for free with the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness. All of this was possible because of what Visa and our brand stand for every day across more than 200 countries and territories, over 18 billion endpoints and more than 400 million seller and wallet locations across consumers, businesses, governments and agents.
Trust enables all of this. We’ve seen meaningful growth acceleration this year, and as I look ahead to 2027, one thing is clear.
Trust is the next growth vector for Visa. Trust fuels everything we do at Visa every day, and trust will fuel our future.
Chris Suh (EVP & Chief Financial Officer)Thanks, Ryan, and good afternoon, everyone. We closed out our strong fiscal year 2026 with another impressive quarter for Visa.
Fiscal fourth quarter net revenue was up 13% year over year in nominal and constant dollars in line with our expectations, reflecting broad-based strength across all our key drivers. EPS was up 17% year over year in nominal and constant dollars, better than expected primarily due to a lower-than-expected tax rate.
Now let’s go into the details. US payments volume grew 10% year over year, generally consistent with Q3.
As we saw, several factors from Q3 continued to play a role, including the cost of fuel, retail, strong Visa Direct growth, and FIFA-related spend. From the FIFA World Cup round of 32 matches on July 1 through the final on July 19, we continued to see both US host cities as well as destination cities benefit from the influx of FIFA fans.
Fourth quarter US credit grew 11% year over year and debit grew 9%. Growth across consumer spend bands remained relatively consistent with prior quarters, with the highest spend band continuing to grow the fastest.
We did not see signs of the lower-spend consumer weakening in our volumes. Fourth quarter total international payments volume was up 9% year over year in constant dollars, generally consistent with the growth we’ve seen all year.
Now to cross-border volume, which I’ll speak to in constant dollars and excluding intra-Europe transactions: Q4 total cross-border volume was up 14% year over year, more than 2 points above Q3, primarily due to travel. Overall US inbound cross-border growth for July remained elevated following strong growth in June, reflecting in part the demand around the FIFA World Cup.
Focusing on inbound cross-border card-present spend, US host cities increased by over 20% year over year from July 1 to July 19, with the most significant increases driven by fans from Argentina and Colombia. With that as the backdrop, I’ll move to discuss our financial results, starting first with the revenue components.
Service revenue grew 14% year over year, above the 10% growth in Q3 constant-dollar payments volume, primarily due to pricing. Data processing revenue grew 16%, above the 10% growth in processed transactions, primarily due to pricing, higher cross-border transaction mix, and value-added services.
Other revenue grew 40%, primarily driven by growth in advisory and other value-added services, especially marketing services revenue as well as pricing. Client incentives grew 21%, a step up of nearly 3 points from Q3, primarily due to new deals that were signed in Q3 and early in Q4.
Now to our three growth engines. Consumer payments revenue was driven by payments volume, cross-border volume, and processed transactions growth.
Commercial and Money Movement Solutions revenue grew 16% year over year in constant dollars with strong growth in the underlying drivers. Commercial payments volume grew 13% in constant dollars, consistent with Q3 and faster than Visa’s overall payments volume growth.
Value-added services revenue grew 31% year over year in constant dollars to $4 billion, driven by three factors: one, underlying business drivers, which included strength in marketing services, engagements related to FIFA; two, pricing; and three, the acquisition of Prisma. Operating expenses grew 12%, consistent with our expectations, driven primarily by marketing and personnel expenses.
4%, lower than our expectations due to claim-of-right tax benefits related to recent legal settlements. 48, up 17% year over year, better than expected with minimal impact from exchange rates.
For our non-GAAP results, Prisma and NewPay added approximately 1 point to net revenue growth, approximately 2 points to operating expense growth, and approximately half a point to EPS growth. We also funded the litigation escrow account by $405 million, which has the same effect as a stock buyback.
4 billion remaining in our buyback authorization. 27.
Full year 2026 CMS revenue growth was 19% and value-added services revenue growth was 30% on a constant-dollar basis. This foundation of strong growth will continue in 2027.
You can review these disclosures in our earnings presentation for more detail. We are still working through regulatory approvals on BioCatch and expect to close no later than the end of the fiscal second quarter, upon which we will provide the expected financial impact.
Now let’s cover our underlying assumptions for net revenue growth. As we regularly say, we’re not economic forecasters, so we’re assuming the macroeconomic environment stays generally where it is today and consumer spending remains resilient.
This implies key business drivers will be strong and improve modestly from 2026 as we lap the impact of the conflict in the Middle East from last year. On pricing for 2027, we expect the benefits of new pricing to be similar in magnitude and timing as in 2026, with the majority going into effect in the back half, even more so than in 2026.
Q1 is expected to have a slight benefit and Q2 is expected to have the largest drag, followed by Q3. On incentives, 2027 will be an important year in securing our long-term client relationships to drive long-term success, as we’re expecting around 25% of our payments volume to be renewed, including renewals with several large clients.
This implies a step up in the year-over-year growth rate from 2026. Now moving to expenses.
As Ryan highlighted, Visa brings trust with our scale, our network and infrastructure, and our products, all delivered through our Visa-as-a-Service stack. In 2027 we will continue to invest across each of these areas, focused on driving sustainable long-term growth.
Let me share a few examples. On network and infrastructure, we will continue investing to strengthen the security and resilience of VisaNet and further develop our on-chain infrastructure across fiat stablecoins and tokenized deposits.
And for our products, we’ll continue investing to advance agentic commerce, expand our offerings for small and lower middle market businesses, and accelerate product development across value-added services. For 2027, we currently expect to grow adjusted operating expense in the low double digits, modestly below net revenue growth.
As we think about the cadence of spend, we expect adjusted operating expense growth to be relatively consistent each quarter, with a moderation in the fourth quarter as we lap FIFA-related spending. Now moving to non-operating expense, which is expected to be between $250 and $300 million, primarily as a result of lower cash balances.
Our tax rate is expected to be about 19%, consistent with our long-term tax rate range of 19% to 20% from 2026, primarily due to the lack of claim-of-right benefits. All of this results in our adjusted EPS growth to be in the low double digits to low teens.
Moving to Q1, but first a comment on monthly drivers. You may recall that we began providing intra-quarter driver data during the pandemic to give greater visibility into the trends during a period of significant volatility.
As the environment has largely normalized for some time now, we believe quarterly trends provide a more meaningful view of the underlying performance of our business. We will, of course, continue to highlight meaningful intra-quarter trends in a Reg FD compliant manner when we believe prudent to do so.
Now let’s look at the drivers through October 21 with volume growth in constant dollars. US payments volume was up 10%, with credit up 11% and debit up 9% year over year.
For constant-dollar cross-border volume excluding transactions within Europe, total volume grew 15% year over year, with e-commerce up 17% and travel up 13%. Now moving to Q1 financial expectations, which again are on an adjusted basis.
We expect Q1 net revenue growth in the low double digits, just under a point below Q4 adjusted net revenue growth, primarily due to a lack of FIFA-related revenue and pricing. We expect Q1 operating expense growth also in the low double digits, modestly below net revenue growth.
As a result, we expect first-quarter EPS growth to be in the low end of mid-teens. As always, if the environment changes and there are events that impact our business, we will remain flexible and thoughtful on balancing short- and long-term considerations.
As Ryan said earlier, trust has always been at the core of Visa, and trust will be key to our growth going forward. Jennifer Comeo (Senior Vice President and Global Head of Investor Relations)Thanks, Chris.
And with that, we’re ready to take questions. OPERATORThank you.
If you would like to ask a question, please press Star one and clearly record your name. You will be announced prior to asking your question.
To ensure all questioners are heard, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. Once again, to ask a question, please press Star one.
To withdraw your question, press Star two. Sanjay Sakrani (Analyst)Thank you.
I guess one of the big topics this quarter was the launch of initiatives like Muse and Instinct, and it seems like the pace of adoption of agentic experiences seems to have accelerated. I’m just curious what Ryan, you guys are seeing in terms of merchant and consumer adoption and when do you expect it to actually affect your results in terms of these token initiatives, et cetera?
Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)I agree, Sanjay, that the quarter was a bit of a tipping point on users being able to experience the type of things we’ve been talking about on calls like this and other forums for a while now, where you can actually have an agent who can go out on your behalf and execute not just shopping but real transactions, and do it either with or without a human in the loop. And I think both Muse and Instinct experiences are good examples of that.
I think it’s still very early. If you just look at the user numbers that are public for Muse, it’s still very early in terms of the number of consumers that are doing this.
And certainly in the big scheme of things in our overall business, it’s a very small amount. Having said that, we remain very excited and have deep conviction about agentic commerce and the promise that it offers not just for buyers and sellers, but for Visa.
And we’re glad that during the quarter people who don’t study the industry, Sanjay, like you and others on the call, and we do, are starting to see the very early use cases and examples of how powerful this can be both for buyers and sellers. So we’re continuing to invest, we continue to have conviction, we’ll continue to work hard across the ecosystem to enable these experiences.
OPERATORNext question please. Thank you.
James Faucett with Morgan Stanley. James Faucett (Analyst)Thank you very much.
Wanted to ask kind of a follow-on question related to how you’re investing in agentic commerce and all the new money movement capabilities. As these flows continue to develop, how much of an opportunity do you expect to genuinely be incremental to Visa versus potentially a migration of existing card volumes?
And as we look at ’27, do we expect any of these to start to have a meaningful impact on growth or the total P&L? Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)I think, you know, I’ll kind of come back to where I was with Sanjay.
It’s still very early. So we do have conviction that the opportunity is significant.
We do have conviction that there’s real incremental opportunities. But as we think about the next four quarters in ’27, it all remains very small in the big scheme of the enormous size of our business.
A couple other notes in terms of where we see incremental opportunities: one, you mentioned some of the work we’ve been doing on Visa Direct and things like that. Those are big incremental opportunities.
Two, when you think about machine-to-machine payments and, you know, the CLI as a commerce interface, there’s a lot of incremental opportunities there. Are agents making more purchases at more seller locations because they’re optimizing based on value, speed, delivery—whatever is important to the user?
Those are opportunities. So I think we remain very excited and have conviction about the opportunities.
OPERATORNext question please. Thank you.
Ken Suchoski with Autonomous Research. Ken Suchoski (Analyst)Hey, good afternoon.
I wanted to ask, just on token pricing, it’s very high-margin revenue building in fiscal year ’27. The guide has a sort of low double-digit revenue growth, low double-digit opex growth, EPS sort of low double digits to low teens.
I was just curious how much token pricing are you embedding in the guide? We’re just getting some questions as to why there’s not more EPS growth.
Chris Suh (EVP & Chief Financial Officer)I can—yeah, there’s a few different things there, and let me try to address each of them or at least cover your main points. In terms of pricing, I outlined our assumptions on pricing in our guide.
The low double-digit adjusted net revenue guide for FY27 assumes that the contribution to growth from pricing in ’27 is consistent with what we saw in ’26. That does include all the pricing plans that we have in motion today.
So that’s one. I think you touched on a couple other things which ultimately sort of laddered up to an EPS point.
On incentives—you brought that one up as well—we are anticipating a higher volume of incentives in ’27. About 25% of our PV will be renewed versus the 20% we saw in ’26.
You know, as we said many times, we manage our business to drive net revenue growth, and we have a strong plan for ’27. They’re a tool that lets us align with a common set of goals and priorities with our partners as we work together to continue to grow the shared business.
And in fact, you know, when we have higher incentive volumes and growth, it does ensure that we’re securing these client relationships over the long period and is a key ingredient to our long-term growth. And then finally you touched on a little bit of the EPS point.
Yeah, we continue to drive productivity growth. You know, we’ve been focused—as we said many times—we’re focused on driving both strong top-line growth and profit growth as we did in ’26, delivering 15% net revenue growth and 16% EPS growth.
And so, as you noticed in our guide for next year, we are continuing to become more efficient and we’re continuing to invest in these growth opportunities. OPERATORNext question, please.
Thank you. Bill Carcassi with Piper Sandler.
Bill Carcassi (Analyst)Thank you. Following up on your commentary around the significant renewals expected in 2027, as more of your clients leverage your VAS offerings, what are the areas as you look to the new year in particular that you’re most excited about, beyond your core capabilities?
Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)Yeah, Bill, it’s Ryan. In short, yes, our—and I would kind of expand it to include both VAS and our CMS offerings.
And, you know, what these broader agreements do is they create a stronger, tighter, deeper, hopefully longer-lasting and more comprehensive client relationship with our clients all around the world. So, you know.
Yes. And then I think finally you asked about some of the specific things in VAS that we’re excited about in that context.
Well, I would point to a lot of the cyber capabilities that I mentioned in my prepared remarks. I would point to capabilities like Pismo, which are new areas where we can support our clients both in core banking and issuer processing.
OPERATORNext question, please. Thank you.
Timothy Chiodo with UBS. Timothy Chiodo (Analyst)Great, thanks a lot.
I want to dig in a little bit—and Ryan, you hit on this, but I want to hit on this a little bit more—on the agentic network token. So our understanding is that this token is sort of a bolstered version of the token.
It’s more of a scoped network token, if you will. It’ll have all the programmatic aspects, meaning a time window, merchant category code, dollar amount.
It’ll have the upfront intent. The question is, how ready are the issuing banks and what do they need to do in order to say, yes, I’m willing to have an agent issue an agentic network token for one of my customers?
And related, what about the merchant acquirers that are out there, the PSPs? Are they ready to accept the tokenization handshake, if you will?
Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)First of all, that was a great summary of a lot of the objectives of Visa Intelligent Commerce and our agentic tokens. In short, we are doing the work across the ecosystem to ensure that issuers, acquirers, and other ecosystem participants are not only ready, but are ready to enable these transactions at scale.
And we know how to do this work. I think I mentioned in my prepared remarks that now we have tokenized e-commerce transactions in 200 countries and territories around the world.
We know how to do this work to enable the ecosystem. I also just want to come back and build on your points around these agentic tokens and just put it in context of what we are delivering through Visa Intelligent Commerce.
First, we want to make sure that there’s an identifiable user behind every agent. So this is why the identity verification and the tokenization is so important.
The second thing we’re trying to do is make sure that your agent is your agent. The third is that we want to make sure your agent is buying according to your instructions.
So these are a lot of the data payloads that you mentioned that ladder up to the intent capture and ultimately the biometric signature. We want to make sure that there’s a clear path to resolution in the event of a problem—so dispute rules and processes and things like that.
And, you know, that is the work that we’re doing. We’ve announced dozens of partners that are utilizing Visa Intelligent Commerce.
OPERATORNext question please. Thank you.
Brian Keene with Citi. Brian Keene (Analyst)Yeah, hi guys.
Solid results here. Just wanted to ask about cross-border.
We’ve seen a little bit of stronger cross-border volumes both in travel and then in e-commerce in particular has kind of jumped to, I think, 17%. Just curious on any details on both travel and e-com as we head into next year, how we should think about those growth rates and some of the drivers there.
Chris Suh (EVP & Chief Financial Officer)Hi Brian. Yeah, total cross-border volume, as you noted, was 14%, with two points above Q3.
And that difference, as I noted in my prepared comments, was due to travel, which was up 3 points from Q3. Now that improvement was primarily due to improvements in both inbound and outbound.
S. inbound remains strong as well in the third quarter.
And then of course I won’t repeat, but you noted the strength in cross-border, which was up a point from Q3. Yeah, I mean, when we look across the cross-border volumes in total, both travel and e-commerce, they are strong.
They’ve been strong throughout the course of FY26 and, when we look at the history of cross-border, they’re above the historical levels. So we’re seeing strength there.
Obviously when we look out, we’re assuming stable drivers. In fact, maybe slight improvement depending on the speed of the potential resolution of the conflict in CEMEA.
But this is something that we’ll continue to be very watchful of. But yeah, we agree with you.
OPERATORNext question please. Thank you.
Darren Keller with Wolfe Research. Darren Keller (Analyst)Hey guys, thanks.
You know, you mentioned you’re going to be doing about 25% of the portfolio in terms of renewals in ’27. And I think you did, correct me if I’m wrong, 20% in 2026, a lot of the portfolio being renewed over a couple of years versus the typical 15% or so per year.
But you’re still able to grow low double digits. I know we often see pricing pressure on renewals.
You’re still guiding low double digits. Is it fair to say you’re seeing two big years of renewals that normally would be 15 to 20 for the years ahead?
And what’s driving that pricing power, despite the renewals we’re seeing? Chris Suh (EVP & Chief Financial Officer)Yeah.
Hey, Darren. Yeah, I’m glad you said that, actually.
First of all, your facts are exactly right. We’re looking at about 25% of our payments volume, which is a bigger year than we saw in 2026, which is around the 20% mark.
So I think that’s exactly the right way to think about it. And as I said earlier in my previous answer, you know, when we have renewal activity and we’re successful in renewing it, it is a great thing for Visa over the long term.
OPERATORNext question, please. Thank you.
Jason Kupferberg with Wells Fargo. S.
volume growth. I mean, a couple of years ago, we were down in the 5–6% range, and now we’re trending up in the 8 to 10% neighborhood over the past few quarters.
I mean, clearly inflation has helped. There’s been probably a little bit of World Cup tailwind.
But how much of this acceleration do you guys feel is more transitory versus being structural and sustainable? Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)It’s Ryan, maybe I’ll try to take a crack at this.
First of all, I think it’s tough to say. S.
economy. We’ve seen strong growth, as you said, kind of an acceleration from 6, 7, 8% 6–12–18 months ago to 10% that you referenced.
I think the foundation underlying that more than anything is employment. Anyone in this country who wants a job, for the most part, has a job.
As I said, the uncertainty remains elevated. But in the context of strong employment, people have jobs, they have real wage growth, they are spending.
And by the way, we see the resilience across the spending bands on our network, so we’ve seen stability in that sense. OPERATORNext question, please.
Thank you. Reina Kumar with Oppenheimer.
Reina Kumar (Analyst at Oppenheimer)Good evening. Thanks for taking my question.
Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)Well, I gave, I believe, some remarks in my prepared comments about the number of new countries and some examples of countries that we’re entering with Pismo. And I would say our geographic expansion opportunities have exceeded my expectations.
Going back to when we bought Pismo, we’re having strong demand around the world from clients, both for the core banking offerings that Pismo offers, but also the issuer processing capabilities. , I think I spent a fair bit of time on the last earnings call going through the market, the segments, the client types.
We see opportunity in the medium and low end for the combined offering that we’ve brought to market across DPS and Pismo. For the more sophisticated clients at the larger end, the largest banks in the United States, we do see opportunities for core banking.
So it tends to be more of a distinct discussion about core banking. S.?
OPERATORNext question, please. Thank you.
Harshita Rawat (Analyst)Hi, good afternoon, Ryan. I want to follow up on your comments on Visa’s cyber-related services.
In the current environment, what kind of demand are you seeing on both your Visa transaction-related services and also for risk beyond Visa transactions in A2A or even in areas like KYC/Identity, et cetera? And also, this feels like a fragmented space beyond these transactions.
So what is Visa’s right to win here? Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)Well, Harshita, I think our right to win is very significant.
We bring strong client relationships. We’ve delivered some great products to the market.
I think it is a somewhat fragmented competitive space around the world with a lot of different players. And this is a top three issue for our clients, especially our financial services clients around the world, and they’re turning to Visa and looking for help.
Obviously I mentioned BioCatch, which we’re excited about, Visa Advanced Authorization, Visa Decision Manager, those types of things. As well as our advisory business in terms of our Visa cybersecurity advisory practice, and even in our issuing business with examples like Smarter Stand-In Processing.
So it’s become a really important set of service lines and services across our entire suite of VAS services. OPERATORNext question please.
Thank you. Andrew Jeffrey with William Blair.
Andrew Jeffrey (Analyst)I appreciate you taking the question, Ryan. I read with some interest the Visa Direct stablecoin launch.
I know you mentioned it in your prepared remarks. The probability notes that you’re going to pre-fund cross-border with VC, at least for starters.
And I know you’re part of the Open Standard consortium. Ryan McInerney (Chief Executive Officer)Sure.
You know, we’re very excited about the Visa Direct product that you mentioned, but just trying to get to the core of your question. We are stablecoin-agnostic.
We are blockchain-agnostic. We serve a vast array of clients with different preferences and different needs around the world.
And so in that particular example, while we started with USDC, we plan to activate other stablecoins as we push forward. We now support five coins in settlement: USDC, USDG, EURC, PYUSD, and SBC.
We have lots of clients who have them for different needs around the world. So we will be agnostic.
We think that’s the right approach. But we also, as you noted, are part of the open consortium.
We are part of OUSD. OPERATORLast question, please.
Thank you. Tien-Tsin Wong with JPMorgan Chase.
Tien-Tsin Wong (Analyst)I’ll close it out with my favorite question on visibility, if you don’t mind. So ’26, a pretty special year for growth.
Ryan and Chris, thinking about ’27, how would you characterize visibility on growth versus this time last year? Where is visibility higher?
Where is it weaker? Where might you be more cautious?
Chris Suh (EVP & Chief Financial Officer)Yeah. Hi, Tien-Tsin.
Listen, the approach that we’ve taken to sharing our initial guide for ’27 is very similar to that that we took at the start of FY26. We shared the initial guidance.
We also shared with you a set of planning assumptions that underlie that. Some of those assumptions are macro, like assuming consumer resiliency and the drivers remain stable and healthy.
And so, you know, you think about those things. And of course, like with any plan, there are risks and opportunities.
But the plan we shared with you I think reflects a balanced point of view that takes all that into account. Jennifer Comeo (Senior Vice President and Global Head of Investor Relations)And with that, we’d like to thank you for joining us today.
If you have additional questions, please feel free to call or email Investor Relations. OPERATORThank you all for participating in the Visa fourth quarter and full year 2026 earnings conference call.
That concludes today’s conference. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription.
For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company’s SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants’ and analysts’ statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
