As digital payments evolve, CIOs are being pushed to modernise infrastructure, strengthen security, and enable faster, more seamless commerce. From stablecoins and agentic commerce to AI-driven fraud defence and biometric authentication, new technologies are reshaping how organisations design and manage payment ecosystems, writes Lineshree Moodley, country head for Visa South Africa.
The convergence of AI, blockchain and data intelligence is transforming global commerce. As people demand faster, safer and more seamless experiences, we’re entering a pivotal moment in how we pay and get paid. For CIOs, these shifts have profound implications.
Stablecoins hit their stride
The potential for stablecoins to enhance and complement the global payments ecosystem is significant – particularly for emerging markets and cross-border transactions. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where remittance costs remain among the highest in the world, stablecoins offer a faster, more affordable, and more reliable way to move money, often settling almost instantly. By introducing a new settlement rail, stablecoins are prompting CIOs to modernise payment infrastructures, expand real-time capabilities, and strengthen alignment across IT, treasury, finance and regulatory teams.
At Visa, stablecoin settlement reached an annualised run rate of $4.5 billion last year. By integrating blockchain-based settlement into real-world financial systems, we are helping bridge digital innovation with trusted, global payments infrastructure – at scale.
Agentic commerce moves mainstream
In 2026, AI-supported shopping – commerce where agents transact on behalf of consumers and businesses – will become very real for all of us and agentic commerce will naturally follow. As top brands bet big on these AI-fuelled shopping experiences moving mainstream, the natural next step into full agentic commerce will gain momentum in 2026.
For CIOs, this shift ushers in a responsibility to ensure that system design ensures that AI agents are securely authenticated, authorised and monitored. Agentic commerce moves CIOs to the centre of trust, control and governance – ensuring AI-driven transactions are safe, explainable and scalable.
Visa is providing key infrastructure and tools in partnership within the ecosystem to enable evolution.
The fight for identity enters the AI era
Fraud is evolving from stolen transactions to stolen identities, as criminals leverage generative AI to produce deepfakes, synthetic identities and increasingly convincing scams – putting trust at risk at scale. At the same time, overly rigid risk controls are driving false declines that cost businesses billions of dollars each year.
This calls for a critical balancing act: delivering seamless experiences while ensuring robust security.
AI risk models will become essential for detecting complex fraud patterns as CIOs become architects of digital trust, blending AI, biometrics and collaboration to secure identities without compromising the user experience.
Through Visa Protect AI‑native risk models are applied across onboarding, authentication, transaction monitoring and scam detection – blocking $40 billion in fraudulent activity using hundreds of AI models trained on global network data. Featurespace delivers deep behavioural insights while Visa adds global scale, and together their ARIC Risk Hub uses adaptive AI to give banks a real‑time macro‑ and micro‑level view that boosts approvals and stops fraud.
Goodbye manual guest checkout
Multi-step guest checkout is disappearing in ecommerce, dropping from nearly half of Visa transactions in 2019 to just 16 percent in 2025. Instead, it is being replaced with tokenised, biometric and device-based authentication, maintaining convenience without compromising security.
As these shifts take shape, checkout moves from being a front-end, UX issue to a core security challenge. CIOs are therefore key drivers of frictionless commerce, ensuring checkout experiences are secure, seamless and scalable by design.
Visa has introduced Visa Payment Passkey, a FIDO‑based authentication solution that uses device biometrics instead of passwords or OTPs, reducing fraud while improving conversion rates. Checkout is now a systems architecture challenge, not just a UX issue.
The beginning of the end for cash?
South Africans say they prefer using cards or digital payments, marking a shift where digital is increasingly becoming the default, not the alternative. This is a significant step towards reducing reliance on cash and enabling financial inclusion.
The decline of cash enhances the role of the CIO in financial inclusion, platform resilience and data-driven innovation.
Visa is investing in digital wallets, real‑time money movement (Visa Direct) and stablecoin‑enabled remittances to bring underbanked populations into the formal economy, particularly in emerging markets where cash historically dominates.
The need for agility is more urgent than ever
Technologies like tokenisation allow institutions to harness and analyse consumer preferences while safeguarding their privacy. With investments like Pismo, Visa is expanding beyond traditional payment rails to enable faster product launches, reduce costs and deliver real-time, personalised banking experiences.
Hyper-personalisation demands agility, and this responsiveness can only be achieved through modern, cloud-native and microservices-based architecture, which can offer the speed and scalability needed to adapt quickly. Within this context, CIOs are no longer just custodians of stability – they are co-owners of growth, speed and customer loyalty. In 2026, rising expectations and rapid digitisation will shape a more intelligent, inclusive, and effectively borderless payments landscape. CIOs will be at the centre of these shifts – as they enable new rules of engagement that foster innovation, enable agility and engineer trust through design.
