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.
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.
Users are then prompted to make payment within the AI platform—securely, with tokenization and authentication—completing an end-to-end online shopping process.
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).
“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.”
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.
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.
