Visa Announces $100 Million Investment in Generative AI for Payments

Visa has launched a new $100 million generative artificial intelligence (AI) initiative to invest in companies focused on developing generative AI technologies and applications that will shape the future of commerce and payments.

The effort builds on Visa’s longstanding use of AI in payments and its commitment to driving innovation in the industry, the global payments company said in a press release on Monday, October 2.

Generative AI, an emerging subfield of AI, uses large language models (LLMs) to create general artificial intelligence that can generate text, images and other content from large amounts of existing data.

Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said in the press release: “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’s generative AI venture initiative is led by Visa Ventures, the company’s global corporate investment arm, according to the press release. Since 2007, Visa Ventures has invested in and partnered with companies driving innovation in payments and commerce.

“With generative AI’s potential to be one of the most transformative technologies of our time, we are excited to expand our focus to invest in some of the most innovative and disruptive venture-backed startups building across generative AI, commerce, and payments,” stated David Rolf, head of Visa Ventures, in the release.

A new era for chief financial officers (CFOs) is being ushered in by an emerging range of AI tools that go beyond isolated automation solutions, according to a May PYMNTS analysis. Employees are being released from less fulfilling jobs and their human-level analytical skills are being enhanced in ways that lead to important company goals thanks to these tools.

As Michael Jabbara, vice president and global head of fraud services at Visa, stated to PYMNTS in a September interview, AI can be used to gather data and transform it into signals that offer actionable intelligence for fraud detection.

AI, Jabbara said, is “he superpower that gives us the ability to detect that proverbial fraudulent needle in the overall haystack of legitimate interactions — and then build the automation necessary to carve out the fraud while letting the authentic transactions go through.”