CEO & Director, Visa
Looking At Next 40 Years Of Growth In India: Visa CEO Ryan Mclnerney | Rising Bharat Summit
Shereen Bhan in conversation with Ryan Mclnerney, CEO of VISA Inc at Rising Bharat Summit 2024.
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About Ryan Mcinerney
Ryan McInerney, CEO of Visa, stated on the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call that Visa has become the "leading hyperscaler of payments globally." He discussed the company's strategy regarding agentic commerce, saying the limiting factor for it is trust, and that Visa's payment methods offer privacy and are integrated into the transaction flow. McInerney also addressed nationalism and sovereignty concerns in payments, describing them as a "long-standing feature of the payments landscape" that Visa has dealt with for decades. On the topic of stablecoins, McInerney said during the Q3 2025 call that Visa sees product-market fit in emerging markets with volatile local currencies and in cross-border money movement. He noted that Visa is supportive of the GENIUS Act, calling it a "key milestone on the path to regulatory clarity." On the Q4 2025 call, he reported that Visa now has more than 130 stablecoin-linked card issuing programs in over 40 countries, and that stablecoin-linked Visa card spend quadrupled year-over-year. McInerney also highlighted Visa's work on agentic commerce, stating the company is powering live agentic transactions and recently released a merchant agent toolkit.
Transcript (22 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:11
Just to give you a sense of the footprint that Visa occupies in fiscal '23, the Visa network enabled $15 trillion in total volume and $276 billion in transactions. They operate across 200 countries, and of course India is a strategic market for Visa. Here's why: outside of their home base, which is the US, India is the second largest employee base for Visa. It's great to get your insight on why you're bullish on India and what gives you confidence about the India digital story. Let's start with your visit to Mumbai. I believe you had quite the experience of using your digital payment system to buy some vada pav on the streets.
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Ryan Mcinerney0:48
I did. It's an honor to be here, looking forward to the discussion. It's been a great trip. This is my first trip back to India since I assumed my new role as CEO of the company, and there's so much happening here, so I'm here to learn. When I was in Mumbai, I was meeting with our partners and our clients: big banks, small banks, fintechs, big techs. I met with our employees who have lots of ideas on things that we can be doing better to help them in the market. And I got out and walked around sound boxes, QR codes, coffee shops. They wanted me to experience what's really happening here so that when we're back helping the team here in India, we really understand it. It was quite an experience.
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Interviewer1:41
Did you expect it to be as smooth as it turned out to be?
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Ryan Mcinerney1:46
I had been told that it was smooth, but until you actually scan the QR code and see how quick it works, and you hear the sound box and the words that come out of it, and you see how that's helping the person who's running the small booth, it's very impressive.
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Interviewer2:01
Speaking of impressive, let's talk about the UPI moment in India. That's been the big event: pre-UPI and post-UPI, that's how the digital payment network is being seen in India. Do you see UPI as competition or do you see UPI as a collaborator?
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Ryan Mcinerney2:19
Well, first let me say I think what's happened with UPI in India is nothing short of remarkable. I think it has accelerated financial inclusion in this country by more than a decade. The speed, the growth, the adoption, the user experiences that I was talking about, they're nothing short of remarkable. We see it as an opportunity for Visa. I believe that we can help build on the financial inclusion that has happened as a result of UPI and help turn that into financial empowerment. Help work with the banks in India, help work with the ecosystem in India to create new credit products, to help people grow up the credit ladder, help them build wealth, help empower them financially as a result of the great work that's happened with UPI in India.
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Interviewer3:08
Given the fact that you believe that UPI presents itself as an opportunity and not necessarily merely as competition, what's the target that you've set for the India team? What's the plan in terms of incremental investments, in terms of expansion? You've got about 4,000 employees here working in India, largely sitting out of your Bengaluru offices. What does all of this mean now as far as Visa's future expansion in India?
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Ryan Mcinerney3:33
Yeah, well, first I'm so proud of our team here, our team in Bengaluru, our team in Mumbai. They are every day coming into work serving our clients, serving our partners, and doing everything that they can do to not only help build new innovations for India, but increasingly to build products and services that we can export from India all around the world. We feel just so proud and so great about the team that we have here. I'll tell you, I leave India thinking I need to set the targets higher, set the targets higher, not for just the investment that we make as a company, but also the results that we expect of our team here. I'll definitely take that back from my trip. We have been in this country for 40 years. When we're thinking about the opportunities in this country, we're thinking about the next 40 years and the next 40 years after that. Those are the time frames we're thinking about in terms of the investments that we're making in the country.
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Interviewer4:26
Well, let's talk about the next five years, not the next 40 years, because we don't know what's going to happen in the next 40 years. So over the next five years, in terms of the opportunities that you spoke of and in terms of focus areas that you intend to double down on: remittances, cross-border. How is Visa going to operate in those spaces? How do you intend to leverage the advantages there?
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Ryan Mcinerney4:47
Yeah, first of all, if you step back, for all of the success that we've been talking about with the digitization of payments in India, there's still more than a trillion dollars in cash. So we're not a cashless economy by any measure. We still have an opportunity to partner and to work to help digitize that cash. But then building on the consumer payments that you and I make every day, there's enormous opportunities in B2B payments, in government payments. There's an enormous opportunity in transit systems. We've been involved in more than 750 transit systems around the world, helping them operate more efficiently by digitizing the payments. And then as you said, we see remittances as a tremendous opportunity. We've built a platform we call Visa Direct, where we have 8.5 billion endpoints: cards, accounts, digital wallets all around the world. What we're doing is putting that platform to work to make remittances in and out of India, and all over the world—but this is the biggest corridor for remittances in the world—make them more transparent, make them faster, make them cheaper, make it a better user experience for both the sender and the receiver. We think that's a tremendous opportunity for us to continue to help and add value here in India.
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Interviewer6:02
You talked about the fact that cash continues to be a significant part of the economy, while digitization has of course grown as well. But just before UPI took over and took off quite literally, the view was that this could potentially mean the death of credit cards. That was the expectation. It hasn't quite turned out that way. But how do you see the credit card space evolving in terms of form factors, features, innovation? What do you see as the next wave of disruption to the credit card itself?
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Ryan Mcinerney6:34
Yeah, what we've seen around the world is users choose to pay with credit in different ways. Sometimes it's a card, sometimes it's a plastic card, sometimes it's a metal card, but increasingly it's a digital tokenized incarnation of the card that can be on your phone or different form factors. Our strategy the whole time has been not to be wed to a card per se. In many ways, we've unbundled credit from what we all think of as the legacy card, and we've embedded that credit in the user experiences that people have as they're working their way through their digital experiences, or as we were talking about earlier, in the physical world. Increasingly the physical and digital world are blending. We very much have unbundled those capabilities, and we do think that there's a lot we can bring to India in terms of innovative products and services in credit specifically that we've seen in different parts of the world. In many ways, the credit product itself has melded and evolved in ways that it's embedded in people's lives and ways that it almost becomes invisible. And that's when you start to really empower that purchasing power in a way that's great for small businesses and merchants.
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Interviewer7:49
You talked about financial empowerment and the credit gap. The credit gap exists in many spaces in different degrees. What will be the focus in bridging the credit gaps specifically from an Indian consumer or Indian market perspective?
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Ryan Mcinerney8:04
Bringing new solutions to help underwrite near-prime credit, new-to-credit, young credit customers. Working with banks to provide different types of line management services, different types of ways to segment credit and make them applicable in certain use cases. All of this type of innovation is happening around the world, and I think it's going to be a great opportunity to build on, as we were saying earlier, the momentum that's happened with UPI. In five years, to come back to the question from a few moments ago, maybe we don't even call it a credit card per se. Maybe we call it Visa credit, or maybe we call it who knows what. The word card may drop from our lexicon in India given the enormous progress that's happened here. But we view our role as someone who can help power that innovation for banks across India.
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Interviewer8:56
You're talking about innovation, so we can't not talk about what's happening in the world of AI. Visa has decided to put together a war chest of $100 million to nurture AI across different startups. Take me through the idea behind that. What do you intend to do? Is that going to be a focus area for you here in India as well?
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Ryan Mcinerney9:23
Yeah, sure. Let me talk about that specifically and then more broadly how we're thinking about generative AI. That idea specifically came from a set of experiences where we were looking for companies that were using generative AI to create new commerce experiences, and we weren't able to find a lot of them. We wanted to go find them and nurture them. We have a program we call Fintech FastTrack, bring them onto the Visa platform. We said, why don't we put together an investment fund so that we can help go find some of those entrepreneurs, those people that are dreaming big about how they could use generative AI to transform commerce, and why don't we invest in them? That's where we started on that journey. If I back up, we're big believers in the power of AI. We've been a leader in AI for 30 years, using predictive AI to build our products and services, secure our network. We've been very aggressive in adopting generative AI in our company. We've made all of the tools and co-pilots available to our employees around the world.
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Interviewer10:21
How much have you invested on that side?
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Ryan Mcinerney10:23
I couldn't give you the number, but if you went and talked to any one of our employees in India or around the world and said, 'Tell me about what Ryan's been talking to you about regarding AI,' he's been on us. Every team in Visa is expected to have a roadmap and a plan of how they're using generative AI to make their function more effective and more efficient. Finance, HR, products obviously. At this point in time, efficiency and effectiveness, right? So it's about efficiency and effectiveness, but I think the real magic is when we're able to bring new products to market using generative AI. I'll give you an example. We have been using generative AI to take our transaction data and create what we call synthetic data sets. With synthetic data sets, we're able to take the same fraud risk and cyber capabilities we've used on the Visa Network and use those to identify fraud on real-time payment networks. We found that we can identify scams and fraud using the same data and analytics from our experience in card payments and apply that to account-to-account payments and real-time payments, all because we have generative AI to create these new synthetic data sets and these new analytic tools.
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Interviewer11:38
Let me just stick with that. Given what's happening in the Indian fintech space specifically on the startup side, is that something that you're looking at closely? Does anything excite you? Are we likely to see you fund anything on that side?
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Ryan Mcinerney11:54
First of all, what's happened in India in the fintech startup space is extraordinary. We partner with most, if not all of them to help them. We've invested in several of them here in India. I'm looking for more generative AI commerce companies, so if you find any as part of this conference, please let me know. We're looking to invest in them. That's the pitch.
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Interviewer12:17
So if anyone's watching this, the global CEO of Visa is on the lookout for Indian fintechs focused on the generative AI space. Hopefully you'll start to get a lot of people writing into you, Ryan.
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Ryan Mcinerney12:29
That would make me extremely happy.