Visa Pushes Stablecoins and AI Payments Into Emerging Markets as CEMEA Tokenization Hits 70%
Visa has rolled out a three-pillar strategy covering artificial intelligence commerce, tokenization, and stablecoin settlement infrastructure, with the Central/Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa region recording some of its sharpest adoption gains yet. The company made the announcements at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco on June 10, 2026. This article covers those CEMEA announcements and examines their relevance to South Asia, which operates under Visa's Asia Pacific regional structure.
Roughly 70% of all Visa transactions across the CEMEA region now carry a tokenized credential, up from 26% in 2023. That figure does not describe volume growth; it describes market penetration. Separately, Visa's stablecoin settlement volumes within CEMEA grew nearly 60 times over in a single year since the capability was introduced.
Globally, Visa's annualized stablecoin settlement run rate reached around $7 billion as of March 2026, with issuing banks settling on-chain seven days a week. More than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs are now live or in development across 50-plus countries.
Visa Head of Crypto Cuy Sheffield wrote in 2025 that the core appeal is straightforward: stablecoins allow money to move instantly across borders at near-zero cost.
That framing resonates in markets where dollar access is structurally constrained. According to Visa, real corporate examples are already in play: an African food producer using stablecoins to pay counterparts in the UK and Switzerland after being locked out of adequate dollar liquidity through conventional banking channels, and a pharmaceutical company settling drug import payments from India to African pharmacies in stablecoins. These are wholesale B2B flows, not retail experiments, which points to genuine structural demand rather than speculative activity.
Visa's commitment to Africa extends beyond individual use cases. The company has made a five-year, $1 billion commitment to the continent, now four years in, and opened its first African data center in Johannesburg in July 2025. Those investments reflect a structural rather than opportunistic approach to emerging market expansion.
Nigeria sits at the center of Africa's stablecoin activity. According to an IMF report published June 16, 2026, Nigeria accounts for 60% of sub-Saharan Africa's stablecoin inflows since 2019, with on-chain stablecoin flows totaling $92.1 billion in the prior year. The IMF also flags risks: at that scale, widespread USD-denominated stablecoin use can weaken domestic monetary policy, a dynamic the report describes as "digital dollarization," and the IMF raises heightened financial integrity concerns alongside that risk.
Visa's Michael Berner, who leads South and East Africa, told TechCabal in May 2026 that crypto-based settlement pilots for African banks are arriving "very, very soon." He added: "The speed and pace at which digital payments are growing in Africa is unprecedented. It is much faster than anywhere else in the world."
African fintech developers building cross-border payment tools now have a clearer Visa API layer to target through the Intelligent Commerce platform, which includes tools called Agent Score (developed with New Generation), an Agentic Directory, and a Large Transaction Model. Visa's Tokenized Deposits product, which converts traditional bank deposits into programmable digital money, is also part of the announced strategy and is directly relevant to bank-facing fintech developers across the region.
A concrete on-the-ground example is a pilot involving Visa, M-Pesa, and Onafriq in the Democratic Republic of Congo, enabling cross-border fund movement between mobile money wallets using stablecoin settlement.
The regulatory environment across Africa is evolving in parallel. Active licensing regimes are in place in South Africa, Botswana, Nigeria, Mauritius, and Namibia. Regulatory sandbox programs are running in Rwanda, Zambia, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania. Kenya has a stablecoin-related bill in parliament. For businesses and developers making market-entry decisions, this patchwork of frameworks is a material consideration.
The AI layer is a second major pillar of Visa's strategy, sitting alongside the stablecoin infrastructure.
Visa announced a collaboration with OpenAI to embed tokenized Visa payments into AI agent commerce, where autonomous software agents can make purchases within user-defined spending limits and permission guardrails. Enterprise applications are also in scope through OpenAI's Codex coding agent. Partners backing this initiative include Microsoft, IBM, Anthropic, Samsung, and Stripe.
Visa's CEMEA president Tareq Muhmood said commerce "is entering a new phase that is increasingly intelligent, programmable, and embedded into everyday experiences."
The practical implication is that any AI agent making a real-world purchase, such as an automated procurement bot or a shopping assistant, would route through Visa's tokenized settlement rails within Visa's Intelligent Commerce ecosystem.
On June 30, 2026, Visa joined more than 140 organizations including Mastercard, Coinbase, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, American Express, Google, and Shopify to launch a consortium called Open Standard, which is building a shared stablecoin called Open USD. The token is expected to go live before the end of 2026 with no fees for minting or redemption, and reserve income will be distributed across member organizations rather than captured by a single issuer.
Circle, which issues USDC and competes in the same settlement category, saw its stock fall roughly 8% on news of the coalition.
USDC has been prominent in DeFi-native settlement across African networks including Celo and Stellar, so developers serving both enterprise card networks and DeFi-native markets will need to track whether competing stablecoin standards fragment or consolidate.
South Asia does not fall under the CEMEA umbrella in Visa's regional structure, but the on-chain picture there is relevant. Stablecoin volumes across South Asia grew 83% year over year between July 2024 and July 2025, driven largely by remittance corridors, according to Chainalysis and TRM Labs.
India and Pakistan both placed among the top-ranked countries in Chainalysis's 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. The broad institutional membership of the Open USD consortium suggests that stablecoin infrastructure could reach South Asian retail and business banking clients through partner channels faster than standalone on-chain activity would indicate.
Global stablecoin real-economy settlement hit approximately $28 trillion in 2025 according to Chainalysis, with the total stablecoin market cap surpassing $300 billion by October of that year. Blockchain analytics platform Plasma.to projects monthly stablecoin transaction volumes approaching $1 trillion by December 2026.
The question for markets in Africa and South Asia is whether Visa's card-network rails accelerate adoption for users who already rely on stablecoins informally, or whether they primarily capture activity that currently bypasses traditional financial infrastructure entirely. As Berner put it in May 2026: "In two or three years, we would not recognise some of the realities we face now."