Not all payment innovation happens where you can see it. Some of the biggest changes are happening in settlement and fund availability. At the same time, new experiences are changing where and how payments get accepted. These two sides of the payment journey are coming together. This is where Visa Direct sits: connecting new ways of accepting payments with new ways of funding and moving money, reliably and at scale. Two developments in particular bring this into focus: stablecoin-based funding and Visa Tap to Pay.
Stablecoins: a new way to fund cross-border payouts
Stablecoins are becoming a practical way to fund and settle certain types of payments. For businesses that rely on cross-border payouts, prefunding has long been a challenge. You often need to park capital in advance, across multiple currencies and accounts, just to make sure payments go out on time. That ties up liquidity and adds complexity.
Visa Direct’s recent stablecoin prefunding pilot directly addresses that challenge. Announced in late 2025, the pilot lets businesses prefund Visa Direct cross-border payouts using stablecoins rather than relying solely on traditional fiat accounts. The goal is to give businesses greater flexibility in managing liquidity while maintaining the controls required for real-world money movement.¹
As Chris Newkirk, President, Commercial & Money Movement Solutions at Visa said when the pilot was announced, cross-border payments have been held back by legacy systems for too long, and Visa Direct’s stablecoin integration gives businesses more choice in how they fund and execute payouts. In practice, stablecoins work alongside existing funding models. Their value lies in the flexibility they add in the right situations.
Visa Tap to Pay: expanding where payments can happen
If stablecoins represent innovation behind the scenes, Visa Tap to Pay brings that change to the point of interaction. It is reshaping how and where payments get accepted.
Visa Tap to Pay lets merchants accept contactless payments directly on supported smartphones, without dedicated point-of-sale hardware. That lowers the barrier for small businesses, pop-up merchants, and service providers that operate outside traditional retail environments.
The result is a broader, more flexible acceptance landscape, where payments can happen in more places, wherever merchants and their customers are transacting. But expanding acceptance also creates downstream pressure.
As more payments are accepted across more places, businesses need faster, more predictable access to funds. Settlement delays that might once have been tolerable become friction points. This is where the front and back end meet.
How Visa Direct connects it all
Visa Tap to Pay changes how payments are accepted. Stablecoin prefunding changes how payouts can be funded. Visa Direct connects those experiences to the movement of money itself.
As the world’s largest money movement network, Visa Direct helps businesses send and receive funds across cards, accounts, and wallets at scale. Today, it connects to approximately 12 billion endpoints across 195+ countries and territories, supporting money movement in over 150 currencies.
That reach matters as payments spread across more places and channels. Businesses are no longer operating on a single rail or in a single geography (or even a single country). They need payment flows that adapt without adding complexity.
Why these innovations matter together
Viewed in isolation, stablecoins and Visa Tap to Pay solve different problems. One deals with liquidity and settlement. The other expands where payments can happen. Together, they show that changes in payments are occurring in more than one place at once. As acceptance becomes more distributed, funding and payout models need to keep pace. As new funding mechanisms emerge, they need to integrate into established payment networks with consistent controls, identity checks, and risk management.
What this means for you
For fintechs and businesses moving money at scale, the takeaway is straightforward:
- Start with the business need, not the technology
- Expect to operate across multiple approaches, not just one
- Make identity, governance, and controls a priority early
- Design for change, because payment models will keep evolving
New payment capabilities give businesses more choice. The real test is whether those choices stand up in the real world. Visa Direct helps make sure new ways of moving money do exactly that.
Visa press release announcing the Visa Direct stablecoin prefunding pilot for cross-border payouts, 2025.