Visa Commits $100 Million to AI for Commerce, Payments

Visa is increasing its wager on artificial intelligence (AI) in commerce and settlements by establishing a new fund to invest in ventures that generate AI.

Visa on October 2 announced a new $100 million generative AI initiative to invest in companies developing commerce and payment-related generative AI technologies and applications.

Visa Ventures, Visa’s global corporate investment subsidiary, will oversee the investment. Visa Ventures has supported innovation in payments and commerce since 2007.

Generative AI is a form of AI technology that can generate text, images, audio, and synthetic data, among other content types. AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard demonstrate the capacity of generative AI to comprehend and produce writing that resembles that of humans.

According to Visa chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell, generative AI has a promising future in the financial realm. Visa’s recent move into generative AI follows significant efforts to implement AI technology in the company’s ecosystem, according to him.

“While much of generative AI so far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology will soon not only reshape how we live and work, but it will also meaningfully change commerce in ways we need to understand.”

Visa stated in 1993 that it was one of the first companies in the world to implement AI-based technology for risk and fraud management. Visa’s real-time monitoring solution for payment fraud, Visa Advanced Authorization, reportedly prevented an estimated $27 billion in fraud in 2022.

Visa also launched VisaNet+AI in 2021, a suite of AI-powered services aimed at resolving delays and confusion in managing account balances and other daily settlement issues for financial institutions.

Smarter Stand-In Processing is one of the VisaNet+AI tools that seeks to improve payment experiences during outages by mimicking issuer approval decisions.

Other comparable products include Smarter Posting, which expedites the payment process for consumers and reduces the perplexity caused by postal delays.

Visa has been bullish on the use of cryptocurrency technology for payments, in addition to its aggressive investments in artificial intelligence.

Visa revealed plans for a new cryptocurrency product in April 2021 to accelerate the widespread adoption of public blockchain networks and stablecoin payments.