Recently, Visa secured approval to deposit $500 million into a U.S. litigation escrow account, while highlighting resilient year-end spending trends and rolling out USDC stablecoin payments and AI-driven commerce initiatives across its network. These moves suggest that Visa is strengthening its approach to legal risk and enriching insights into consumer spending, while advancing a next-generation payments infrastructure spanning from stablecoins to agent AI payments. The launch of Visa’s USDC payments and its AI commerce push could serve as a near-term catalyst for payments growth, though regulatory risk and exposure around the escrow funds and interchange remain key concerns.
The US-focused USDC payments raise the risk of bypassing Visa’s rails by driving stablecoins and on-chain payments into the company’s existing stack; this is the most relevant development. For investors focused on catalysts, this could represent another path for Visa to carve out a place in future digital payments through its Agent Commerce initiatives and Visa Direct. Yet behind these innovations lie regulatory and interchange-fee pressures that investors should recognize. Visa projects revenue of $51.9 billion and earnings of $27.5 billion by 2028.
To realize this, annual revenue growth of about 10.1% and earnings rising from $20.1 billion to $7.4 billion are required. According to Visa’s projections, the fair value implied by its guidance would suggest a stock price around $395.44, about 11% above current levels. A one-year price chart shows the Simply Wall St community valuing Visa between roughly $338 and $463 per share, highlighting wide variance in growth expectations. The spread implies that bets on USDC payments and AI-powered commerce could materially influence long-term performance, so investors should compare multiple valuations to form their stance.
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