Airwallex Wants to Own the Future of AI Billing

Hey Payments Fanatic!

Airwallex is moving deeper into one of the most important battlegrounds in FinTech right now: billing infrastructure.

The company just launched Airwallex Billing, a new product designed for businesses managing subscriptions, invoices, and increasingly, usage-based pricing models tied to AI and APIs.

And this feels like a very logical next step.

A lot of modern businesses no longer bill customers in simple monthly subscriptions. AI companies charge by token usage, SaaS platforms mix subscriptions with consumption pricing, and global businesses are managing payments across multiple currencies and tax systems at the same time.

Most legacy billing systems were never designed for that level of complexity.

What stood out to me is that Airwallex clearly wants to become much more than a payments company. It’s positioning itself as the financial operating layer underneath global internet businesses, putting it in even more direct competition with players like Stripe.

And the bigger AI and SaaS ecosystems become, the more important the infrastructure layer starts to look.

Today's remaining Payments headlines are just below. 👇 See you tomorrow!

Cheers,

Marcel

INSIGHTS

🇪🇸 Getnet, Banco Santander's leading global FinTech payments company, has launched the second edition of its AI Graduate Program. The program seeks to attract young professionals with analytical skills and a solid technical foundation to work on real business projects related to areas such as payments, FX, risk, operations, or product development.

📊 Fiserv’s Q1 2026 results highlighted the growing importance of AI orchestration and operational automation in traditional banking infrastructure. While adjusted revenue and earnings declined year over year, the company emphasized AI infrastructure as a key strategic focus for the next phase of financial services modernization. Find the full breakdown here

NEWS

🌍 Airwallex has launched Airwallex Billing, a modular billing platform designed to support invoicing, subscriptions, and usage-based pricing for global businesses. The suite enables companies to manage multi-currency payments, recurring billing, and real-time usage metering as demand grows for more flexible revenue infrastructure across AI, SaaS, and cross-border commerce.

🌍 Mastercard and Chainlink bring card crypto buying to DeFi. The system connects Mastercard’s global card network with Chainlink’s blockchain infrastructure. It is designed to support crypto purchases through Swapper Finance.

🇺🇸 Mastercard granted the New York State Department of Financial Services a BitLicense, through its Mastercard Transaction Services unit, strengthening its ability to operate in regulated digital asset and stablecoin infrastructure markets. The approval supports Mastercard’s broader strategy around interoperable digital payments, tokenized deposits, and regulated settlement infrastructure. 

🇺🇸 SoFiUSD becomes the first stablecoin issued by a US National Bank to launch on a banking platform. SoFiUSD is built to help bridge the gap between the flexibility of a stablecoin and the stability of a bank. It is supported by deep institutional liquidity and efficient execution, helping promote stable pricing and reliable high-volume trading for all members.

🇺🇸 FreedomPay and Ordr partner to power the only unified payments intelligence platform in sports and live entertainment. The partnership integrates FreedomPay’s commerce platform, creating a fully integrated payments ecosystem through seamless API connections to CRM, ticketing, and point-of-sale platforms.

🇺🇸 Yaspa appoints US FinTech and gaming veteran Justin Fears as US sales director. Fears will be responsible for supporting Yaspa’s expansion throughout North America, helping gaming operators modernise payment experiences through real-time bank payments, intelligent transaction solutions, and next-generation payment innovation.

🇬🇧 UK’s biggest banks back scheme to challenge Visa and Mastercard dominance. Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, and NatWest are among lenders backing a new UK payment scheme being rolled out to challenge the dominance of Visa and MasterCard and accelerate the use of bank-to-bank transactions, bypassing payment intermediaries.

🇺🇸 Visa expands commercial solutions hub with integration of Visa Accounts Receivable Manager. Through a new integration with Visa AR Manager, eligible issuers gain built-in access to end-to-end processing designed to reduce operational friction and accelerate commercial card growth.

🇬🇧 PayPoint announces a partnership with SmarterPay to strengthen fraud and error prevention for companies using Confirmation of Payee (CoP). PayPoint’s CoP offering enables SmarterPay’s customers to instantly verify payee account details as part of their manual or automated payment workflows, reinforcing security and accountability at every step.

🇳🇿 BlinkPay proves Kiwi real-time payments. BlinkPay has demonstrated real-time payments in New Zealand using existing open banking infrastructure and a Bank of New Zealand account. The test transaction reportedly settled in 2.6 seconds, highlighting the potential for faster account-to-account payments compared with the country’s traditional banking rails.

🇨🇳  Tencent links PayPal to WeChat Pay network, enabling US users to spend across China. U.S. PayPal users can now make purchases across China ​using WeChat Pay's QR-code merchant ‌network, Tencent Financial Technology said, adding the service will be rolled ​out to PayPal users in ​other markets in phases.

🇺🇸 Block kicks off Cash App’s phased stablecoin rollout to its nearly 60 million users. Cash App will support USDC on Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, and Arbitrum as a payment rail with strict transaction limits, while warning that blockchain transfers are irreversible and the feature is unavailable in New York and for sponsored accounts.

🇺🇸 Robinhood launches agentic trading for Robinhood Gold card users and announces a credit card for AI agents with 3% cash back, allowing AI agents to make purchases and execute trading actions on behalf of customers through controlled virtual cards.

🇺🇸 Nium and Circle to Connect USDC Settlement with Global Payouts. With Nium now part of CPN, financial institutions can route payments through the CPN network to Nium’s payout infrastructure, including access to Nium’s entire portfolio of countries and currencies through a single integration.

🇺🇸 Highnote collaborates with Visa on Agentic Commerce for AI-initiated payments. The launch enables businesses to extend payment capabilities to AI agents, allowing software to initiate and execute transactions within predefined rules, spend controls, and approval structures.

GOLDEN NUGGET

𝐓𝐡𝐞 Visa 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲 𝐌𝐚𝐩: Acquisitions, Investments & Partnerships 👇 Created by Arthur Bedel 💳 ♻️

Most people see Visa as a card network.

The strategy map tells a very different story.

Visa is systematically acquiring, investing, and partnering its way into becoming the infrastructure layer for the next era of commerce. Here is how the pieces connect:

1️⃣ 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐮𝐝 & 𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲: 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫

Visa acquired Featurespace for $946M. The result: ARIC Risk Hub, an adaptive AI engine that builds individual behavioral profiles per user to stop fraud in real time.

→ Fraud prevention is no longer a cost center. It is a product.

2️⃣ 𝐓𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲

50% of Visa e-commerce transactions are now tokenized.

In 2024 alone, tokenization delivered $110B in incremental merchant sales — a 5% authorization lift — and reduced fraud by 35%, saving $1.1B annually.

Guest checkout without tokenization has collapsed: from 44% of e-commerce transactions in 2019 to just 16% today. Among Visa's top 25 merchants, it is below 4%.

→ Visa owns what replaced it.

3️⃣. 𝐀𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐟𝐭

In April 2025, Visa launched Visa Intelligent Commerce — giving developers APIs to embed payments, identity, and spending controls directly into AI agents.

100+ partners. 20+ agent enablers integrating directly. 100s of real-world agent-initiated transactions already completed in live production environments.

Partners include OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Skyfire, Ramp, Nevermined, nekuda.

In October 2025, Visa introduced the Trusted Agent Protocol alongside 10+ partners — an open framework helping merchants distinguish legitimate AI agents from bots at checkout.

→ Visa predicts millions of consumers will transact via AI agents by the 2026 holiday season.

4️⃣ 𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞-𝐀𝐝𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞

VAS revenue reached $10.9B in fiscal 2025 — up 24% YoY, more than double Visa's overall growth rate.

With Pismo (cloud-native issuer processing, $929M) and Featurespace ($946M), Visa now competes directly with FIS, Fiserv, TSYS, and fraud vendors.

→ The $520B VAS addressable market is not theoretical. It is revenue currently captured by processors and fraud vendors — and Visa is systematically taking it.

The payment networks that thrived from 1970 to 2020 processed transactions.

The ones that will define 2025 to 2045 will orchestrate commerce.

Visa is betting $13B in annual tech investment that it can be both.

Is any other network executing this level of strategic depth right now — or is Visa pulling away from the field?

🚨 What's the next area of innovation for Visa? → Digital Assets (Canton), Intelligence, others?

✍️ Comment below.

Source: CB Insights

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