Next up, we have Andrew Torre. He is President of Value-Added Services at Visa, better known as VAS. I want to thank you for joining us. Andrew has been with Visa since 2002, working across product, strategy, and pricing. Before he took on his current role, he led Visa's Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, CEMEA, overseeing operations across 86 countries and territories. Thank you. Wow, that was a lot of countries that you oversaw.
It was, certainly. Yeah.
Well, I mean, you are, as I said, the man of the hour because VAS is kind of the big part of the Visa story for the investment community and obviously for the payments industry. So, having been at Visa for almost 20 years, maybe you could just talk about how your experiences informed your current role and what changes you have made since arriving at VAS.
Yeah. Thanks, Sanjay. It is great to be here. Thank you all for joining today. So yeah, I have been with Visa now a little over 20 years. I started at Visa in our commercial solutions business way back when we were an association. I did that for a number of years, and then I actually left Visa, and I went and launched a prepaid card program with Providian. I then went and worked with a fintech called BankServ, which we would probably describe them as a PayFac now. But I was running a business where we were doing ACH payments, electronic check truncation.
but also card processing. Before the IPO, I came back to Visa. I started in corporate strategy, then I led our pricing and interchange function. In 2012 or so, I kept raising my hand and wanting to go do a client-facing country manager job at Visa. They are some of the most important positions in the company. They sent me to Russia. I happened to live there before and speak Russian, so it was a pretty good fit. I was there from 2013 to 2016 during certainly one of the faster-growing markets, but we all know the sanctions happened, and it changed a lot of the way actually we thought about working with domestic switches and schemes with Value-Added Services there. I then went on to run Sub-Saharan Africa and then the regional president job.
I have had a good mix of product experience earlier in my time, but then really frontline work with clients, with our sales teams. As you said, there is a lot we have learned from 86 markets. At Visa, we generally think every market is different and every market is unique, but that said, there are kind of these major market archetypes, and it really changes how we think about addressing client needs in a market. We have got kind of four major archetypes. You have got these markets that are very digital. Cards have really, really scaled in other forms of payments.
We have markets where cards are leading and you have got the right infrastructure and they are just continuing to kind of eat up PCE. Then you have got these markets where you see cards and wallets and real-time payment systems, and everyone is competing. Then we have got these cash-rich archetypes. I saw all of those markets in CEMEA, which has been very helpful for now, how I think about this new role. I started it in June of last year. Right away, one of the things I wanted to do was make sure we can really build quickly, bring better product and capabilities faster into our markets.
We have done a really good job of addressing that. Just when you look at the signals we have from our sales teams on the ground, all of the data we have on our clients, all of their needs, we have gone from a product development standpoint, from kind of using AI tools to write code to now agentic tools with human supervision, and it has really been able to elevate a lot of the go-to-market strategy. If you just think about first, in a traditional way of coding and developing, you are getting lots of signals from clients. They talk about what features and functionality you are looking at, doing market research.
The reality is, then you want to develop prototypes. We are using our new agentic toolchain in this pre-loop to very rapidly create prototypes, like very, very quickly. I was an early adopter of this to show our team how powerful it was, and you can develop prototypes very, very quickly. You can get validation, and then we've got this inner loop with our product and tech people. They're much smaller now. They're no longer these eight to 10 person groups. They're t wo to three people, and you almost can't tell who the developer is, who the engineer is, and who the product person.
They're largely co-located, and then on the outer loop, it's obviously managing code deployment and then getting feedback. We've made real success in this area this year. We've launched over 350 new products, features, and services, and that's a 25% increase last year. 60% of our developers and product teams have adopted this, and we're going to get to 100%. What is it? It's borne fruit in all of our product platforms, and it's not just using AI to build better tools. The tools themselves are embedded in AI. If you think about on the acceptance side, we've got Visa Intelligent Authorization, which uses our globality and scale to route transactions to the place that they're going to have the highest success rate.
It also is able to infuse data into the transaction to be able to get either a better interchange rate or to be able to have a higher likelihood of authorization. We've launched credit on our DPS platform this year using Pismo technology again, brought through these new agentic tools. In cyber, we've launched our Visa Threat Intelligence platform, which has AI embedded in it.
And then, of course, we've been continuing to use some of the tools we've created, our Visa Agentic Harness, which we used with Mythos and Glasswing to be able to look at our own code to be able to see where there are potential vulnerabilities. We've now made that available on GitHub, and we're using that to help our clients as well. Across all of those dimensions, we're seeing better ability to bring clients capabilities faster, and we see just a ton of runway to continue to grow.
Could I just say your experience is vast, and it makes a whole lot of sense how you're sort of working in VAS right now. I guess, you talked about this vast portfolio in VAS, right? It includes issuing, acceptance, risk and security, advisory, and other services. Maybe you could just talk about what's the common strategic thread connecting these areas and what Visa's most durable competitive advantage is in VAS.
Yeah. At the heart, it's right in the name. It's Value-Added Services, right? So, we wake up every day, whether you're in one of our product and tech centers or whether you're on the front line, saying, "How can I help my clients perform better? Where are their gaps? Where are their needs, and how can we address them?" That's the thread across all of our different product areas. The way we have traditionally done this is we've supported Visa payments in Value-Added Services. We've gone beyond Visa payments increasingly, and I'll talk more about that.
We're supporting all payments, and then we've gone beyond payments as well. So in the Visa payment side, we want to make sure, of course, with Visa transactions, we continue to be the best way to pay and be paid. So whether it's an issuing solution, whether it's a network product, whether it's acceptance, whether it's our risk solutions, we're constantly innovating to drive just better performance and address client needs. If you think about then our move beyond Visa payments into serving other payments, we've had our debit processing asset in the U.S., which, of course, if you're going to be competitive, you need to support not just Visa debit cards, but other cards. Then increasingly, in some of our risk products, when our clients feel pain around transaction fraud and risk, we always want to try to help. We've got this capability called Visa Advanced Authorization.
Anytime a transaction's processed on our transaction, in the authorization message, we provide a Visa Advanced Authorization score, which says, "How likely is this to be a good transaction or not?" I bought a coffee this morning downstairs. I'm based in San Francisco. That transaction came in milliseconds. It got approved because Visa and the data we have suggest that it is likely that Andrew's going to be here and buying a coffee. We had clients that have said, "Well, we need to support other card brands. Domestic schemes are starting to proliferate as well. We love your Visa Advanced Authorization.
Can we bring that same capability to non-card payments where they do not have the data sets and pools to be able to support that?" That actually started with a client in the U.A.E. when I was there, and we said, "Let's give it a try." We went out and did a pilot, and we took our data, and it was incredibly effective at also divining whether something was fraudulent or not in another non-Visa card transaction. We see huge runway there. Our clients want to be able to get as much as they can from one provider, right? It is just easier. You get synergies. We have developed that and scaled it.
We have got almost 400 million transactions, and we see a lot of appetite for that. That is just apropos of lots of the other things we are doing beyond just Visa payments. Beyond payments more broadly, we will probably talk about core banking with Pismo. We are making real forays into cyber, et cetera. Our advisory lines of business are all beyond payments, where we are providing tremendous value to our clients.
That makes sense.
I did not say the durable advantage.
Yeah.
I should have mentioned that. The durable advantage is, when you are Visa, and we have been in business for so long, and we are providing technology platforms, they have seen the resilience, stability, and security of our network. They know that we are not just innovating for today, but we are seeing around corners, and we are able to keep up with what is coming down the road.
Part of our secret sauce is also our AEs and others that sit with the clients, and then it is, of course, our distribution network. We have got 14,000 financial institution partners that opt in every day. We have got tons of connections. We have got lots of sellers that want to work with us. It is easy then, when you have got that trust and security, and you have got the data and intelligence on what our clients want to be able to develop and scale more broadly.
Got it. I think one of the questions investors have is how much visibility there is to the sales cycle, right? Maybe you could just talk about how that sales motion has evolved over time. Is it really add-on to existing deals? Is it a new source of getting a deal in through the door. Maybe you could just talk about the sales motion.
Yeah. We have a ton of visibility in our own sales processes, and it was not always that way, but we have invested a ton of money with our CRM systems to be able to bring the total seller experience client back into everything we do. It really starts with our Account Executives. We have Account Executives that cover all 14,000 financial institutions, acquirers, PayFacs, tech partners, large co-brand partners. We cover them all. So we have AEs that are deeply thinking about them. I am always amazed when I go into an office.
I was in the U.A.E. in South Africa last week, and I walk into an office, and our Account Executives is there, and I love it when our client says they are really part of our team, which is great because they spend a lot of time there, and they spend a lot of time thinking about how we can help serve our clients. So, we have this tremendous amount of data. We do a lot of account planning as well as part of this. When we made the move to stand up VAS and our commercial and money movement groups, we brought in these specialized sellers because some of the sales and some of the tools are much more complex from a technology standpoint.
We have 450 VAS sellers, and we have sales engineers being able to make sure not only do we sign and win the deal, we implement it flawlessly. We've really spent a lot of time on that as well. What that allows us to do is with that data, with that understanding of our clients, and we're monitoring their performance in real time, we understand what the opportunities are, and we're always looking at ways we can help them. When it comes into deals, if a deal's up for renewal, for example, we are mapping whether it's a three, five, seven, 10-year vision of how do we differentiate ourselves and what can we provide to really make them grow at a faster pace. VAS is certainly a big part of that. It really comes out last year's renewal with Navy Fed.
There was everything in there. There was consumer, there was commercial, there was Visa Direct, there was VAS, there was DPS, and a lot of that comes in as part of the plan we have to help support their business growth. We had a win last year with a client, and a lot of that win was born on the fact that we had a bunch of VAS solutions that they wanted around modernization and really just getting to market faster. We've won that, and we're busy implementing them with VAS. Then, of course, the deals tend to be episodic, but we're always around and engaging them during the course of the deals as well. It's a big part of our go-to-market motion.
How has that process changed over time?
Yeah, it's a good question. The process has changed over time. We have much better and more aligned incentives in the organization. There's no daylight between what the AE needs to achieve and the VAS specialist sellers. Same things with the AEs and the specialized sellers in commercial and money movement as well. They're aligned, they're going to market. The account teams, the specialized sellers sit on the account teams as well.
Got it. When we think about the 14,000 financial institution clients, how much of the growth will be increased adoption of the VAS products versus boots on the ground that deepen engagement with other clients for initial sales?
Yeah, it is both. I will give you. I talked about the AEs and the VAS sellers. There are two other actors that are really important to our frontline go-to-market sales motions. They are our client success managers. So these are the people that deeply understand how our clients connect to us, how they operate. Every time we do a business enhancement release, these are the people on the front lines over the weekend making sure the business enhancement releases go well. So, they are kind of a good adjunct to the account executives. They understand kind of the back office and how the technology works. Then increasingly, as we have grown our Visa Consulting and Analytics team, these folks are in the office embedded with our clients increasingly every day.
So, there is a lot of data we get from that, and I will give you a good example of how our advisory businesses really help our clients. So, it was a little over a year ago, we noticed in Asia, well, the regional president of AP noticed that one of our largest clients in the market was degrowing. He asked our Visa Consulting and Analytics teams, "Can you go in and see how we can help them?" We came up with the, "We are not just going to help make recommendations. We are going to roll up our sleeves. We are going to take your KPI." So, they were a trading customers, they were degrowing, they had some challenges along a number of multiple dimensions there.
So we said, "Okay, your goals are our goals. We are going to embed teams with you, and we are going to do the work together with you." It was a really big success, and it kind of just shows you, when you look at all the steps that our clients have to take around acquiring new customers, this client had a problem where we are seeing with other places, clients around the world, where there is a lot of growth in the affluent market, but there is also a lot of demand and competition for that. This client had fallen behind on their card benefits and their card value proposition.
So the first thing we did was we came in and really helped them create a really great card value proposition, because you cannot expect to attract and engage customers unless you are really at the level of competition, hopefully better. We did that, and then through the process of doing this, we found out that they had some other opportunities as well. They were declining too many transactions, especially transactions when you are overseas.
Those were certainly consumers fear most vulnerable. If I were to check out of the hotel overseas and I could not use my card, that is a problem, right? We worked with them through this, and part of naturally finding these opportunities, we are selling in other VAS services that solve these problems. This worked incredibly well. We did 40 of them in FY 2026, and we are looking to more than double them because it really powers our client's business, and it is a natural way when you see opportunities, we bring in and sell behind that.
When you benchmark success, obviously you can look at the growth rates and say, "Wow, it is successful." Maybe relative to the competition, what are you guys doing different relative to the competition?
Yeah. We can benchmark our clients against lots of different dimensions. We can benchmark them on just a product portfolio. We can benchmark them against the market. We can benchmark them against some of the more nimble players. We can benchmark them on any dimension across anywhere on the globe. We can benchmark them on how high their authorization rates are.
We can benchmark them on what their conversion is when they are acquiring customers, how fast they activate, how deep they are driving usage. On almost any dimension, we can benchmark them, and we do, and that data is always on, and we are using it, and we love it when our clients come to us and challenge us. In fact, almost every single account has a quarterly business review where the leadership team of the client and our leadership teams and markets sit around, and we talk about, and they push us, "How can you make me better?" Because often, they are comped on how they are doing against competitors in the market.
Got it. Maybe I am going to go into each of the areas, starting with issuing solutions. On the earnings call, I think Ryan said that issuing acceptance and risk security grew over 20% collectively in fiscal year 2026, and you expect them again to grow that much in 2027. Maybe you could just talk about what is powering in that portfolio, starting with issuing and then driving the strength there.
Sure. They are all growing north of 20%. Issuing, also growing north of 20%, and it has got three major areas to think about. One, I just referred to, the card benefit side, the client in Asia that had real challenges with their customer value proposition, and you just cannot win unless you have got a good customer value proposition today. It is not just in the affluent, ultra-high net worth. You have got the Gen Zs, which are top of mind for our customers. It is a cohort they do not know that well. They are starting to really spend. They are very digital, and these are the customers of the future. We really work and help develop a series of benefits. You have had traditional benefits like airport lounge and insurance and things like that.
But we are able to do a lot more. For example, in Q4 of last year, we launched our Infinite series. We have over 70 clients in 40 markets using the product. We have 15 in Latin America and Santander in Mexico. This Infinite is high net worth, ultra-high net worth, and it has got Infinite Privilege and Infinite Private. Within those, you can really differentiate your customers. I will just give you one example, because I was in the U.A.E. last week, and in that launch, we are able to provide assets that is going to be really relevant to the ultra-high net worth in the U.A.E., and it features things like yachts and private jet perks. It can be that, but it can also be things that Gen Z wants, which is they are excited about gaming, they are excited about experiences and dining.
It is kind of everything in between. That is our card benefits business. It is a good source of growth for us, and we are doing more to be able to give our clients these experience for their cardholders. The next is around our network products and solutions, and this is using kind of network intelligence to solve things. One of the things we have really been able to do over time is just watching how our issuers authorize transactions. If for some reason they are down, for example, we can step in and authorize just like they would authorize. That is called Smarter Stand-In Processing. But we also have other network solutions. I suspect almost everyone in this room has subscriptions. They have become very popular in the U.S., so popular that there was a ton of demand.
We've taken a couple sets of functionality to allow cardholders to look in your mobile banking app, and you can see everywhere you've got a subscription, which is super helpful, and then decide whether you want to change it or do something with it. We've got over 2 billion credentials in that. We're constantly looking at ways we can create better experience, better intelligence with our network products. Then, of course, on the issuing side, we've got our processing platforms, our issuer processing platforms, and then also with core banking with Pismo.
I want to talk about that, because that's a hot topic.
Yep.
Right? When you guys announced the acquisition of Pismo, many investors sort of viewed core processing as somewhat outside your traditional role. Maybe you could talk about what you were trying to solve and why it's been so successful.
Yeah. I talked about getting really good signal from clients. We spend a ton of time with clients, and we were hearing similar things over and over again. We were hearing that there's a ton of cost and complexity. We were hearing this from heads of retail. We were hearing it from the chief technology officers and the innovation officers. "I've got multiple processors. It's cumbersome. It's costly to be able to do that.
When we announced the Visa Flexible Credential, which, for those of you who don't know it's the ability to take one card or one PAN, and on the back end, it can either be debit, it can be credit, it could be multiple forms of credit, it could be prepaid, it could be loyalty, which sounds amazing until, as you're a bank, you're trying to figure out, "How am I going to implement this?" Agility to market was a real big thing. A lot of our traditional financial institutions are on legacy infrastructure, and then the new fintechs were coming in, and time to market is incredibly important. It's never been more important to be able to get a new product or service to market, because you can start to sweep up consumers.
That operating agility was important. Architecture and tech debt was another one. The legacy environments have been around 20, 30 years. The ability to then expose things to API, do real-time processing, and also the tech debt has become even more important now with bad actors having AI. Tech debt means you probably have more vulnerabilities. The last thing is engineering capacity. While legacy infrastructure works, it consumes an increasing amount of time of our financial institution clients' engineering, and that engineering should be put on other things that really help differentiate them. We took all four of these signals and we said, "We think we should be able to play in this space, leveraging our experience with DPS." But we wanted something that was modern, cloud native, API based, that would address these things, the agility, et cetera.
We looked at over a dozen companies, and Pismo was the clear winner in this space, and it's really borne out that way. I mean, if you look at what we're able to do with this platform, it's incredibly impressive. I talk to clients. We can roll out new features, new functionality, and upgrades daily. Our clients tend to have their own operating environment here, so we can do it seamlessly, so we can move at their speed and at the agility they want, and allows them to scale across different markets.
On the processing side, we support debit, credit, and commercial. We've had a good win with Westpac. But we can also start with our clients on Pismo, just because it's net new. We can just say, "Listen, let's prove out one use case for you. Do you want to do credit with us? Do you want to do commercial?" They don't have to move everything over. They can move part of the business t est it, learn, and then decide over time they will expand. We are in 28 markets now. It is the question when I travel to markets, our clients ask me a lot about Pismo and our country managers.
They want it to come to market. There is always work we need to do to open a new market, and we are constantly looking at prioritizing. We are eventually going to get everywhere, but we are at 28 now, and we are going to grow. On the U.S. side, I mentioned how it is supporting our debit processing system there with credit. We have had a good core banking win with Wells Fargo on the ledger. We are incredibly excited about the asset. Tons of demand, tons of runway for growth.
I mean, just one related question. Wells Fargo was a great win. I mean, do you see other big institutions like that following suit across the world, or do you think it is more geared towards a mid to small market bank?
On the core banking side?
On the core banking side.
Wells Fargo started with the ledger, and the ledger is kind of the backbone of any core banking solution. The legacy infrastructure has been around 20, 30 years. Every client around the world is going to have to contend with, "I need to get off of legacy infrastructure at some point." Just the costs are going to be too high on legacy infrastructure, but they do it thoughtfully, they do it carefully.
This is a trend that will play out, in my opinion, over the course of the next five or 10 years. I think when you start to see some clients around the world start to really upgrade their core, I think you will see more. There are also really benefits in upgrading your core, because when you do that, you can start to look at areas you want to do or areas you want to outsource, so it can become much more componentized as well, which will ultimately give financial institutions more flexibility.
Do you think larger financial institutions have a bigger budget so they can actually do that versus smaller institutions? Because cost is always an inhibitor.
Yeah. I think cost is. First of all, it depends how much tech debt and how much complexity they have, because the cost of running these systems is not that high, actually, because we got workloads in the cloud. The cost is, when do you want to do the transformation, and what's the calculus in the financial institution of when do the costs of continuing to support legacy infrastructure, the cost, the agility, the tech debt, when do they get overwhelmed? I think you'll start to see clients do some of the things I said. They'll maybe start testing us out with issuer processing, and then they'll see how cores play out.
It's also really important, people still have to get used to really putting workloads into the cloud itself. We're making sure that everything we do, we're active-active to be able to support that type of functionality, because especially when you're running cores, you want to make sure you're always online, you're always ready, and the cloud technology's getting better and better as well.
Got it. We're going to move on to acceptance solutions and the next big popular topic, tokenization and tokens, period. Maybe you could talk about the impact that token pricing has had during this year and over time, what you expect from it, and how do we get to 100% tokenized e-commerce?
Yeah. We definitely want to get to 100% tokenized transactions, and we want to get there because tokens are much better. If you just look at, if you take a step back, I think we launched tokens a little over 10 years ago, and they solve two basic problems. Especially in e-commerce, you get higher approval rates. Consumers and sellers themselves love higher approval rates. There's about a 5% uplift when a transaction is tokenized, and you also have a significant reduction in fraud, about 35% or so. On e-commerce, we're about 60% token penetration, and we want to get tokens out in every single corner of the ecosystem. We've got real focus on the areas where there's still opportunity, how we get from 60% to 100%. Some of it is just around, there's lots of stored credentials in merchants and acquirers and PayFac.
We want to get tokens in those places. Guest checkout is still pretty significant. For those of you who have done a guest checkout, it's painful. You've got to input a PAN, and you have more card abandonment. But the ability in guest checkout to put a token is really, really powerful as well. We see new markets where there's opportunity, and we see the ability with new technologies to be able to do more. There's a bunch of areas there. On the pricing side, we hadn't priced tokens for many, many years. They've got broad-scale adoption. We started pricing in April of this year. And we're always incredibly thoughtful about how we price. Of course, we're pricing to value, because we just talked about the ways in which tokens deliver real value, but we also want to make sure we continue to increase adoption.
We want to get to this 100% adoption. It makes consumer and seller experience better. And so we've got service fees already built in to make sure that merchants get tokens and lifecycle management. But we realize there are some unique things that we do as a network to be able to get the right incentives across both sides of the network. In order to get tokens from 60% to 100%, it's going to take real collaboration on the seller side and the issuer side. And this is something we do very well with a series of incentives to be able to drive that adoption and behavior. We launched a digital commerce authentication program, which really makes sure that we've got the right incentives for merchants to be able to start to tokenize transactions and share data.
And when they share the data with the issuers, it makes the decisions better. So, when we launched this program and created some interchange and pricing incentives to really drive adoption, we thought we'd get 100, 200 basis point lift. We're seeing a 300 basis point lift. So it's really proving out. So, we feel really good about that program, and we think that'll help us get a long way to getting more adoption and more value out of the tokens as well.
You can take a guess on when we get to 100%?
Ooh.
Five years?
Hopefully while I'm still working at Visa.
Okay, got it. All right, moving on to risk and security solutions. Ryan spoke to the increased cyber demand on the call as well, and I think he talked about cyber as more than just risk and security solutions. How would you define Visa's cyber offering today, and where are you seeing the most interest from clients?
Yeah. I spend a lot of time with clients, and this cyber has become a top three issue. In fact, last week when I was in South Africa and the U.A.E., it was literally the first word out of almost all of our clients' mouths. We've always been known for trust, scalability, and resiliency, but everyone's certainly concerned about cyber. Our clients experience different things. They experience, obviously, fraud on payments. They experience identity theft. They experience account takeover. They're all part of this single connected trust problem. We've been in this space for a long time. It extends beyond risk and security. It extends across all of our different portfolios. We look at it in four areas, and I'll get to the punchline now. We still see tons of growth in this. The first area is certainly around the Visa Threat Intelligence space.
Visa has been using our own tools for years and years, not just to monitor our network, but to monitor the payment ecosystem itself. We took one of our solutions, which we built for ourself, our own kind of Visa Threat Intelligence Platform, and we productized it to be able to support our clients. That took a little bit of UI and UX. We embedded AI, because as you can imagine right now, there's a ton of signal out there. You could have credentials that are in the dark web that are yours that have been compromised. There's lots of other signal, and our clients often need to know which signal's the most important, which signal's the most urgent. Our intelligence platform is able to score it, tell you which one you want to go after first, and we are increasingly bringing better data in with this.
We announced a partnership and made a small investment with this company called Overwatch, which is a pretty incredible capability they've all developed. They have developed a bot army, an agent army, to go crawl in the dark web, and they act like they're part of the bad actors in that web. They're constantly pulling data and bringing it back. We're using that data for our own network, but we're also able to bring that into our Visa Threat Intelligence Platform to be able to better inform our clients if something's happened, whether there's a breach or there's something they need to do. That's one, that space. Then there's identity access and behavioral trust solutions. We played in this space with our Visa Consumer Authentication Service. We recently announced, and we're hoping to close BioCatch. BioCatch sits squarely in the identity space. We're incredibly excited about this space.
We've learned over time that the credential's no longer the weakest link. It's us. It's the consumer. We're continually seeing when they're manipulated, when they're being scammed, it's happening digitally. BioCatch has an SDK. They play directly in the mobile device and online when consumers are using the service. It can very quickly tell whether, just the way I don't have my phone on me, but the way I pick up my phone, whether I'm using multiple fingers, one finger, the angle I have, and it creates a biometric, is this Andrew? It also may know it's me, but it may know I'm under duress. For example, if I'm being phished or schemed, I'm no longer adding something from rote memory. I'm waiting for someone to tell me something, and the way I approach it, the way I type on the screen is very, very different.
We're excited about that acquisition, and when it closes, we're excited about it. We played in the transaction intelligence space for a long time. I talked about VAA, Decision Manager. Featurespace is a great and a capability for us to create specific models for clients and use that data. I mentioned our Visa Intelligent Authorization. Of course, we've got solutions to protect our clients if something bad happens.
If they go down, we have our Smarter Stand-In Processing to be able to authorize on their behalf. We've got a capability called Visa Risk Manager. We've had clients who have been infiltrated before, where they take over their authorization systems. We have a Visa Risk Manager tool which has a bunch of rules for clients. It can stop transactions, and it sits outside of their perimeter, so they're protected there as well, as our Visa Agentic Harness. Lots of demand, lots of runway, and we are continuing across all of our product platforms to continue to meet it.
Okay, we got less than two minutes, but I want to get through three things.
Okay.
All right?
Speed dating.
All right, speed. I want to talk about advisory and other, because that's one of the fastest growing areas, and you had FIFA-related marketing expense in 2026. Maybe you could talk about 2027 and what makes you excited about that segment.
Yeah, so we're lapping an absolutely incredible year with the FIFA event held right here in the U.S., the finals here in New York. Every time we have either the men's or women's World Cup, we get better, we get smarter. We worked with more clients than we ever have on this FIFA campaign. 20% of the clients we worked with, I think it was across 70 different countries, were new.
So we've learned how to better monetize these assets to create great experiences, acquisition engine, so lots of things happening there. It's given us real conviction that we're going to go deeper and we're going to have more sponsorship assets. I talked about it around card benefits, but the same things. There's a huge appetite in gaming, in music, in dining, and you'll see us bring more sponsorship assets. Our clients want it from us, and it knows it can drive and power their business.
Okay. Another leg to this stool for VAS. Is there another leg that you guys are thinking about, and how would it be achieved, organically or through acquisition?
Yeah. There's obviously a lot going on. There's a lot more in cyber. We're very interested in this space. There are certainly areas in stablecoin, if you think of the four layer or the four or five layers, depending on how you scan it, on the stablecoin stack. We think we've got a real right to bring a lot of the things we do to payments around identity, around some of the risk solutions, et cetera. Pismo's already able to support stablecoin payments. We've got an issuer, Gnosis Pay, on it, and we're going to be looking to integrate Pismo into our Visa Stablecoin Platform there. Early days, but we think we have a real right to win in this space, and products coming out. Then obviously, agentic commerce. Big, big opportunities there.
That's what I wanted to talk about last. Last but not least, but probably something we could talk about for 45 minutes, is agentic commerce. How big of an opportunity is it for VAS? Where does it fit in? How quickly does it impact revenues, in your mind?
Yeah, I'm going to really quickly go through this. You're seeing innovation starts slowly until it's sudden. What you've seen over the course of the last month or two months is real interest in agentic commerce. You've seen Instinct, you've seen news, and we deeply believe that the future of agentic commerce is tokens. It's agentic tokens, which we can talk about some other time, that add real value. We've got our Visa Intelligent Commerce platform that really allows these transactions to work the way they're supposed to work.
I was just, as I mentioned, in South Africa and in the U.A.E., and a bunch of our clients, it's not just in the U.S., clients all over the world see this coming and want to get in our agentic sandbox with Visa Intelligent Commerce to start figuring out how they can adopt, because there is a lot of consumer interest. Of course, our clients want to be there where their consumers want to be. More coming, but I think we're very well positioned to capitalize on agentic commerce, both as Visa and VAS.
Andrew, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Appreciate your time.
Appreciate it.
We got through a lot.