Visa announced on September 8 a new onchain lending model that lets fintechs and card programs borrow working capital against their own stablecoin settlement data rather than traditional collateral. The company said stablecoin settlement volume on its network has passed a $20 billion annualized run rate, up more than 15 times year over year, with more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs now live and payment volume on those programs up nearly 200 percent year over year.
The mechanism is what makes this more than a stablecoin volume update. Visa is packaging its own settlement data as underwriting evidence, letting a lender like Credit Coop extend credit against a card program’s real-time payment performance instead of a static balance sheet. “Payment companies have always had good collateral in their settlement receivables, but no way to show lenders how it performs in real time,” said Chris Walker, founder and CEO of Credit Coop, in Visa’s announcement. Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth products and partnerships, framed the broader ambition: “Stablecoins are not only changing how money moves, they’re creating opportunities to rethink the financial infrastructure that supports payments.” The Credit Coop facility already tied to this model has supported more than $2.5 billion in cumulative financed settlement volume since 2023 with zero defaults, and has processed over 3,000 borrow events and 9,000 repayment events programmatically onchain.
The original insight is that Visa is not entering onchain lending as a lender itself. It is turning its settlement rails into the credit bureau for a market segment banks have historically underserved: stablecoin-linked card issuers whose real collateral, transaction flow, is invisible to a conventional underwriter. That is the same infrastructure instinct behind card issuers racing to own more of the payment rails they used to just ride on, applied here to Visa instead of an issuer, and it extends work Visa has already done making network-level data a product in its own right, as with its move to turn fraud detection into a shared utility across the network rather than a private capability.
Source: Visa
