JUSTIN MEHTA: We’re the right-after-lunch crowd, so I know you guys are awake and ready to get started. So again, I’m Justin and this is Geri, and we’re part of the Consumer Payments team here at Visa. We’re going to have a conversation with each other and with you guys, and we’re going to talk about the future of ecommerce and where we’re going around innovation—and actually some of the announcements that were even made today at the product keynote. 

So our first question is gonna be Geri. Geri, what do you like [about] working with Visa and Stripe? 

GERALDINE MITCHLEY: I mean, what is not to like about working for Visa and Stripe? I mean, just fantastic to be here. I’m usually in the audience, so I’m quite excited to be up here on the stage. And just amazing. I think our team is totally buzzed about the transformation that’s going on in the industry. 

We heard from Patrick and John last night about not just the tailwinds of trends that are going on, but almost the tsunami of changes that we’re going to see in the industry. And then we heard from Will this morning around the partnership that Visa has with Stripe, around agentic and stablecoin, and of course also what we’re doing with Stripe around connected devices. So really, really exciting. And I’m seeing some of the folks in our team—this is the stuff that we eat for breakfast. We love it. 

One moment we are imagining what we could do with our customers, and the next moment we are piloting in-market, and that’s what makes it fun, and we love working with Stripe and our partners to innovate and build these payment experiences. How about you, Justin? 

JUSTIN MEHTA: So, working with Visa and with Stripe, it’s incredible because of our commitment to innovation and working on commerce and payments. 

We get to work with the largest tech and fintech players, players like Stripe. It allows us to sit on the cornerstone and the cutting edge of commerce and payments and innovation, and think about all the future work that we can do to help make our customers safe. 

We also work on really hard problems. How do we keep our merchants safe? How do we keep our merchants relevant? How do we keep our customers safe? How do we meet our customers where they want to be when they’re looking for easy payment mechanisms? And how they use different options of paying, because there’s a lot of them out there today. 

And ultimately, the impact and magic we have as Visa, we touch billions of people on a daily basis. That impact is so empowering for us as an organization, because as we think about the future of commerce, we really get to drive change and really get to think about the forefront of what’s happening next. So it’s truly the best way to be paid and get paid. 

So let’s ask the first question from our conversation. So last year, Visa talked about the evolution of tokenization. What advancements are you seeing built on this technology that’s accelerating the future of ecommerce? 

GERALDINE MITCHLEY: Yeah, certainly a lot has happened over the last year, and we continue to drive the fortification of the token. And last week, actually, Jack Forestell, our chief product officer, spoke about our desire to eventually get to 100% of all credentials being tokenized. And really, it’s because we are speaking about the power of the token. It’s really this coating of the credential that allows us to store configuration, lifecycle management, risk credentials, AI preferences—of course, that’s the topic of the day. 

All of these kinds of codification aspects that we can put into the credential is really what we can build into the token. And so the token is becoming the foundation of innovation and allows us to create these buildable experiences together with Stripe and their partners. And so we’ve made some significant progress so far. 

Today, we had about 13 billion of our credentials being tokenized, and Stripe has made a fantastic contribution with almost 45% growth over the last 12 months. We’ve done a couple of things to get to these growth rates, such as with Apple, we’ve enabled multidevice provisioning, which means that there’s no breakage in the payment experience of the subscription cycle when a consumer is moving their token from an old device to a new device, or from one device to the other. 

We’ve also included the launch of Tap to Add Card to Apple Pay, and we’ll have the other pays launching later this year. We’ve also included upgrading our authentication process of token provisioning, and this means that we see an improvement on the tokens provisioned because we are updating that authorization methodology with issuer solutions such as app-to-app and web-to-app, and really using much more advanced security methods to provision that token. 

And lastly, we’ve really accelerated our Click to Pay solution, which is Visa’s premier guest checkout tokenization card solution. So a lot of good work has been done, Justin, but we still have a lot to do. Only 50% of ecommerce today is tokenized. And as I mentioned, Jack is looking for us to tokenize all of ecommerce. And tokenization is going to power this next tsunami of kind of step-change that we need to embrace with this technology. And so that’s what we’re striving for. 

So as much as we’ve addressed these advancements, we still see a lot of cart abandonment, shoppers abandoning their checkout page, as well as security risks. What are we doing to address some of these challenges? 

JUSTIN MEHTA: It’s a great question. So, how many people here were at the product keynote this morning? Everybody should raise their hand, so hopefully. 

Will talked a lot about some of these issues where these are helping—working with Stripe, you know, collaboratively to help solve. So cart abandonment is a really big problem in commerce today. So we see almost 80% cart abandonment just from users having to manually enter their credit card information. How many times do you fat-finger it? How many times do you enter the wrong expiration date? And so forth. So we’ve got to do better. We’ve got to help solve that. 

The other thing that we see a lot of problems on is around fraud, especially in the card-not-present space. Everything’s becoming more digital. More and more of our experiences are happening on our phones or in our laptops or other devices. And when you think about digital payments, there’s so many new vectors that are attacking all of us, right, from all different angles. And we have to learn how to protect our customers, and we have to empower all our partners to protect our customers, and make payments as easy as possible. 

As we think about addressing these issues as Visa, we have to make the checkout process as simple as possible. So as we think about simplicity, we think about seamless, frictionless customer experiences. We think about, how do you drive personalization and loyal customer bases? And we think about enhanced security and increased authorization rates. So let’s talk about some of the things that we’re actually doing to make this happen—especially, again, in conjunction with Stripe. 

So some of the first features that we’re actually pushing out to market right now is we have advanced authentication tools like Visa Data Only using Visa Intelligent Data Exchange. It’s called IDX. You may hear of IDX in the future. Providing enhanced data to help our issuers, our partners, make smarter decisions when they’re authorizing transactions. So IDX provides our partners with additional signals around transactions. So when they’re validating “[Does] this credit card actually belong to a known user?”, we can make that authorization decision along the way. So it minimizes fraud during that process. 

We also have biometric authentication. So this is like Visa Payment Passkeys, where we’re sending cryptographic keys that replace passwords and replace OTP, and use things like face ID, your fingerprint, even device PIN. So we’ve already seen a 50% reduction in fraud because you don’t have to worry about that random SMS that comes in that says, “Hey can you authorize?” or the sketchy phone call that you might get, like, “I don’t recognize this number.” It’s now all just using your biometrics in order to authenticate yourself. 

So Geri, now think about this. Speaking of advanced authentication, what are some of the ways that using tap technology actually helps solve this problem as well? 

GERALDINE MITCHLEY: Yeah. I mean, I think this is also really exciting to see that we’ve seen some new ways that consumers can also authorize and confirm, and choose to make payments or authorize payments. So this is pretty exciting. 

The simple tap of a card that we know and love when we shop in-store is now coming into the ecommerce experience, and as I mentioned, into that ecomm or identity and authentication application. So what we are doing is we’re building upon the same Tap to Phone framework, and Tap to Phone is really the capability to turn a phone into a soft pause. 

And Stripe of course is one of our frontrunners, one of our first partners to adopt Tap to Pay on iPhone, and Tap to Pay on Android, which is really turning a mobile phone into a card-present terminal, no hardware required, which has been fantastic to help small businesses really offer a full omnichannel service, enabling both card-present and card-present acceptance. 

And just as a reminder, we’ve seen fantastic growth of Tap to Phone over the last year. We’ve seen a 200% growth rate of the Tap to Phone capability. And so it’s a really robust technology that started to prove itself out in terms of enabling millions of small businesses—in fact, all businesses of all sizes. 

And so what we’re doing now is we’re using that same technology stack of Tap to Phone and NFC smartphones, as well as Visa certification process, to transcend some of these use cases into the ecommerce space for these tokenization provisioning options, authentication options, and identification applications. 

And so we’re starting to package some of these applications and some of these user experiences under what Visa is calling Tap to Everything. Let’s have a look.

VIDEO: Visa Tap brings the ease and security of contactless payments to new mobile experiences. The tap of a Visa card to your cardholder’s phone or to someone else’s will open a new world of convenience and opportunity. All it takes is a tap. With Tap to Activate, when a cardholder receives their new card, they just tap it to their participating phone using their issuer mobile app for card authentication and cryptogram validation. 

Tap to Add Card helps Visa cardholders avoid the effort and errors of manual card entry by letting them simply tap to add their card to a participating digital wallet or merchant app. Tap to Confirm is a security step-up to confirm a cardholder is in possession of their card for things like high-value money transfers or updated account information. 

With Tap to P2P, Visa cardholders can send and receive money with friends and family using a participating digital wallet. With the tap of a friend’s card or phone to your cardholder’s phone, the money is securely transferred. Visa Tap brings the convenience of the tap with quick, frictionless, and secure mobile experiences. All it takes is a tap. 

GERALDINE MITCHLEY: So let’s take a look at those tap experiences one by one. First, we have a Tap to Activate. Really as simple as that. I don’t really need to explain a lot. It’s so simple. It’s as simple as that tap. With Tap to Activate, when a cardholder receives perhaps a new card from their issuer bank, all they need to do is tap their card to their mobile banking app. And what happens is we do an activation through a cryptogram validation. And simply the consumer is tapping the card to that mobile app to activate their card. And we also see some additional use cases coming out of that, but a fantastic cost-saving for issuers and a great experience for consumers. 

With Tap to P2P or Tap to Transfer, tap to top-up or tap to disperse, we see many applications here where there’s no longer a requirement for sending and receiving recipients to have the same digital wallet. We’re now expanding the capability for wallets to be able to send and receive into and out of Visa credentials.

So again as we saw in that video, what can happen is a user can simply tap their card or their Visa credential to a recipient’s wallet to be able to send or receive funds. Or perhaps I could tap my card to my own wallet in order to top-up a wallet, or to be able to disperse money into my card or my Visa credential. And so, sending and receiving, again, is really just as simple as a tap.

And then we have Tap to Add Card. As I mentioned in the beginning when we were talking about how we are accelerating tokenization, we launched this with Apple Pay in September last year, and we will be launching additional Tap to Add Card use cases with the other pays, as well as Tap to Add Card for merchant on file as well. And that has been massively successful. 

So Tap to Add Card launched with Apple Pay in September last year. We now have over 100 issuers participating across the globe. And what we see is a 90% reduction in fraud as opposed to that manual key entry or capturing your card with your phone camera. So a significant upgrade in token provisioning and the quality of that token provisioning. And again, that great convenient customer experience, but the security of using a chip cryptogram to be able to provision that token to your card. 

And then we have Tap to Confirm. And here, again, two use cases. So first of all on the merchant side, this is a fantastic use case for merchants who need to significantly streamline their ecommerce when it comes to a situation where they need that additional security in order to step up. Perhaps a transaction that is maybe triggering some kind of risk or fraud really is triggering that merchant to just check that indeed that consumer is still in possession of that card, and so they would request a tap for that proof of card possession before that transaction is processed. 

Another example could be on the issuer side where a banking application of Tap to Confirm would be to do a second factor step-up for security-sensitive transactions such as a wire transfer or change your password or update your address. And so many applications of this “Tap to” in order to update, verify, make a payment, secure a payment, provision a token. 

And as I say, we do have an additional backlog of innovation coming out with these “Tap to” use cases. And so this is taking the Tap to Phone technology and now moving it to our “Tap to Own Phone,” and really is providing consumer choice, right? We keep speaking about how consumer choice is really expanding with all of the wave of change that we’re seeing that technology is presenting. And so we’re changing how customers are able to receive, approve, and make payments. 

And we’re looking forward to really piloting this with Stripe and Stripe’s customers, and we are embarking on some of those pilots today. But Justin, I know tap is one of the consumer choice innovations that we’re launching. What about AI? Let’s talk about that. 

JUSTIN MEHTA: All right, let’s talk about AI. Let’s talk about agentic. We know that’s top of everybody’s mind. We know Will talked a lot about it today, this morning. We’re gonna carry that conversation on. 

So, first and foremost, AI enables us to deliver highly personalized shopping experiences by predicting and anticipating, you know, all of our customer needs, right? We’ve heard this story. We know through AI-powered recommendations, we can tailor the products and services to individual preferences, making the shopping experience much more intuitive and efficient. So let’s take an example. 

So instead of facial cream, I’m going to use headphones. 

So let’s say you’re buying headphones, right? Today, using chatbots, using agents—and we’re probably already doing it with ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude—but all these platforms are actually going through merchant sites, reviews. They’re curating a set of results that we can utilize. They’re trying to find the perfect set of headphones for us, as individuals. 

But once the headphones are found, we still, as individuals, still have to go through those results. You still have to get to a payments page and actually enter in your payment credentials. And you have to make the final purchase yourself. And so if you really think about it, agentic commerce, while it involves this AI-powered personal assistance that buys on our behalf, it doesn’t really create that final connection, right? And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that, because we really want to enhance our overall shopping experience and really make it easy for our consumers, especially in this new world of agentic and AI-driven commerce. 

But first, we need to solve some problems. If we think about our three major constituents in an ecosystem, right, the shoppers, the sellers, and our financial institutions. Consumers, really, they just want payments to be easy and safe. So how do we, as technology providers, provide that framework for our consumers to where they can trust their agents, but feel like they’re also in control of the payment process and their payment vehicles?

Sellers really want their products to be discoverable. But in the world of agentic, when agents are doing the discovery for you, how do you make sure that they’re going to be relevant and that their products are still connecting with consumers when you go through that shopping experience? And in financial institutions, they ultimately need to understand, who is the person behind this agent? So how do we at Visa, and working with Stripe, really make agentic commerce and make agent-to-agent shopping feasible and trustworthy and safe? 

So by addressing all these needs, we can create a seamless and secure commerce environment that benefits all the stakeholders. But let’s think about these problems a little bit more. Let’s go back to our headphones. What happens now if I bought a pair of headphones, but instead of 1, I get 500 headphones? What do I do? What happens if instead of headphones, I get earmuffs? What do I do? What happens if instead of headphones I get little teeny tiny headphones from Temu. Sorry, Temu. What do I do? All these are problems when you’re talking about agent-to-agent commerce, because there’s no definitive recourse. 

So about a week ago, we actually introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce to help build the first generation of agentic commerce. With Visa Intelligent Commerce, agents can operate with unmatched safety, deliver personalized commerce experiences, and execute friction-free payments, all backed by Visa’s brand and trust. 

The reality is, agents aren’t built for payments. And without payments, agentic commerce is just not really commerce. It’s like window-shopping. So Visa Intelligent Commerce helps bring this all together. It solves the payment problem. It’s a new way to buy with AI with the same trusted, secure way to pay. So let’s take a look at the details. And to be very specific, the partnership that we talked about this morning is all going to be shown here. 

VIDEO: Introducing Visa Intelligent Commerce. Allowing AI to shop and buy. 

Add. Smile. Done. It’s that simple. You’re in control to make the final call. 

Or you set the limits, and let it do the rest. New way to buy; same trusted, secure way to pay. Visa Intelligent Commerce. Use AI to buy. 

JUSTIN MEHTA: The future of commerce. We’re here. So what makes Visa Intelligent Commerce? So we’re introducing three main pieces. The first is AI-ready cards. We are upgrading your Visa card to ensure financial institutions and merchants know the agent is legitimate and acting on your behalf. We’re adding new layers of protection, trust, and control. We’re also introducing AI-powered personalization. 

We’re injecting insights from billions of payment transactions into AI commerce while keeping the customers safe and in control of their data. And then we’re doing simple and secure AI payments. We’re working on payments to work flawlessly in agentic experiences to provide pain-free shopping experiences without the cognitive overload. And we’re going to do it in a way that gives all parties trust and transparency and control. We’re just getting started. But this is where we’re starting to co-develop with partners like Stripe. 

Let’s take one more click into this and talk about the actual features and services that make up those three pillars. For AI-ready cards, we’re delivering two capabilities: tokenization and authentication. These two services have been the backbone of digital commerce for Visa for decades. We are now adapting them for the agent-powered world. 

For personalization, we’re upgrading a capability that we announced about a year ago called Data Tokens, and we’re making it integration-ready for AI agents. Finally, for simple and secure AI payments, we are introducing two new services. We’re doing Payment Instructions, which is about allowing users and agents to both understand the intent of what is actually being purchased. 

We’re adding Payment Signals, which is about providing rich context around the transaction itself. It can help enable post-purchase transactions and servicing and effective fraud prevention. Our financial institutions and merchants, they are our network; and working together, we’re bringing this to life, and we’re bringing this to our consumers. 

It doesn’t stop there. There’s a lot of enablers all partnered together to make this happen. From payment service providers like Stripe, to AI enablers like Scale, and to B2B enablers like Ramp, we are all working together to build a new ecosystem around AI and agentic payments. 

So in closing, Geri, I’d love to ask you, how does Visa’s partnership really contribute to the future of ecommerce in general? 

GERALDINE MITCHLEY: Well, I think, really, what we are covering so much today—and absolutely our partnership with Stripe, you can see we are enabling innovative solutions. We are making sure that our solutions are safe, secure, flexible, and making sure that Stripe’s partners and their businesses are closing more sales, increasing their authorization rates, and really are able to take up the opportunity of these new technology trends quickly in order to grow their businesses as fast as the trends are growing as well. 

And so we’re really looking forward to embarking on this partnership with Stripe and Stripe’s ecosystem as well. 

JUSTIN MEHTA: Great, well, thank you all so much. 

GERALDINE MITCHLEY: Thank you very much.