Next Wave of Fintech: Why Stripe, Adyen, Visa, and PayPal See a Sea Change Coming
Integrated platforms for all payments, with AI and stablecoin as new drivers
What does it look like when the world’s most influential payments companies all start pointing in the same direction? Over the last year, an uncanny consensus has emerged from four recent shareholder letters and investor presentations—Stripe, Adyen, Visa, and PayPal each signaled that something big is on the horizon.
Two major forces have taken center stage: agentic AI (autonomous artificial intelligence systems that can spend money on their own) and stablecoins (a type of cryptocurrency pegged to something more predictable, like the U.S. dollar). On the surface, these technologies might sound niche. Yet reading each company’s frank assessment of the next few years reveals that they consider these developments to be truly disruptive—capable of reshaping global commerce far more than you might guess from the hype or headlines.
Below, I’ll explore how each company frames the potential of AI and stablecoins, discussing both the factual details from recent public materials and my own interpretation of the deeper trends. The result, I believe, is a vivid picture of a fintech sector that’s racing to build not just better payment rails, but also an entirely new layer of intelligence and programmable money. If stablecoins can bring global real-time settlement, and if autonomous agents can start doing a lot of the “thinking” behind commerce, we’re looking at a shift that goes beyond just shaving costs. Instead, it may transform how businesses and consumers handle everyday financial tasks—while simultaneously expanding the definition of what counts as a “financial actor” in the first place.
A Surge of Payment Volume and the Power of New Technologies
Stripe’s Landmark Year
Stripe’s 2024 shareholder letter radiated confidence. One particularly striking figure was the $1.4 trillion in total payment volume processed through Stripe in 2024, which they estimate to be about 1.3% of global GDP. That is extraordinary for a relatively young (though now quite large) fintech firm. Stripe pointed to some familiar reasons for their rapid growth—such as longstanding investments in core machine learning and risk-fraud engines. Yet the letter also introduced two emerging topics that Stripe’s leadership clearly thinks are set to scale quickly: stablecoins and agentic AI.
On stablecoins, Stripe’s leadership described stablecoins as something akin to “room-temperature superconductors for financial services,” referencing how they hold the potential for frictionless, near-instant transactions. They acquired Bridge, a stablecoin orchestration platform, and made it clear that stablecoins are not just for crypto-native companies. Big corporations, CFOs, and immigrant remittance services all want simpler money movement. Stripe sees stablecoins as bridging the gap between, say, a small business in Argentina that’s selling internationally and a consumer in another part of the world. Because stablecoins can be cheaper, faster, and more globally accessible than traditional rails, they can unlock new cross-border flows in ways that neither classic card networks nor wires can easily replicate.
On the agentic AI side, Stripe set out a bold vision for an AI economy where semi-autonomous systems can take actions and make purchases on behalf of users. To accelerate that, they launched the Agent SDK to help developers build “autonomous critters” that operate on your instructions. These critters can open virtual cards or use Stripe’s Link or Apple Pay, all with guardrails and spending controls. While it might sound futuristic, early-stage companies are already building agent-based applications in tasks like subscription management, invoice paying, or even e-commerce chatbots that finalize orders after an AI conversation. Stripe expects more than 700 such agentic startups to launch next year alone—and is positioning itself as the default “money rails” for these AI tools.
Adyen’s Emphasis on R&D and Unified Commerce
Adyen, in its H2 2024 shareholder letter, highlighted 22% net revenue growth year-over-year and a continued push into “unified commerce”—that is, connecting online and in-person payments through a single backend. While Adyen’s big story in prior years was about bridging e-commerce with brick-and-mortar, now they’re layering on new real-time payment methods like Pix in Brazil and forging a path to handle stablecoin or account-to-account flows as well. Adyen’s operational scale is as impressive: this is a firm that powers the behind-the-scenes checkouts for some of the biggest online retailers, content platforms, and point-of-sale environments.
One gem in the letter is that Adyen’s newest features revolve around an AI-driven optimization engine, called “Adyen Uplift,” that simultaneously balances fraud prevention, cost control, and authorization rates. Instead of requiring a merchant to guess how to configure rules (which often leads to false declines or missed fraud), Adyen’s system effectively runs it for them, employing the huge data sets Adyen has from processing over a trillion euros in payments annually. This constant iteration on data intelligence is reminiscent of Stripe’s approach, with both companies acknowledging that advanced AI is more than an add-on feature—it’s increasingly the main event in payments. The better your AI, the more you can guarantee merchants an improvement in top-line revenue and cost savings.
Though stablecoins were not as front-and-center for Adyen as they were for Stripe or Visa, the letter suggested that new payment methods (including real-time bank rails, digital wallets, or stablecoins) remain on Adyen’s radar for future expansions. Adyen invests heavily in building or acquiring direct local connections—like its RTP integration in the U.S. or Pix in Brazil—so that it can route transactions in the most efficient way possible. And as stablecoins mature as an accepted local method, that routing becomes relevant. If we see stablecoins as the holy grail for cross-border money flow, then it’s easy to see them eventually getting folded into Adyen’s global unified platform and connecting these domestic networks seemlessly.
Visa-as-a-Service and Stablecoin Plans
Visa’s 2025 Investor Day documents explicitly position the company for a new era. Historically, Visa’s brand equaled card-based digital payments. Since 2020, the narrative has been about being a “network of networks” that sits on top of all sorts of rails—cards, real-time bank transfers, digital wallets, crypto rails, and stablecoins. Now, Visa’s new strategy is referred to as “Visa-as-a-Service,” highlighting that they’re basically unbundling their platform so that large or small partners can pick and choose capabilities like risk scoring, tokenization, or wallet issuance. This is a sign that the largest card network in the world sees how money movement is diversifying beyond credit or debit rails.
One particularly striking note is Visa’s clarity on stablecoins: they see them as making money movement “cheaper, faster, globally available from day one, and programmable.” They compare stablecoins to eurodollars—basically, a global usage of dollars stored in offshore banks. Except stablecoins might be more accessible and composable in software. They already have a pilot for stablecoin settlements with Circle (the issuer of USD Coin) and are in advanced talks with large global enterprises. The letter reads as though Visa fully expects stablecoins to become a standard money layer, rather than a far-off possibility.
PayPal’s Move to “One PayPal Platform”
PayPal’s 2025 Investor Day materials hammered a similar message: the “super-app” vision is evolving, bridging everything from BNPL (buy now, pay later) to merchant acceptance tools, to crypto. Interestingly, PayPal singled out the concept of “token agility,” referencing stablecoins or other digital tokens that can be easily swapped behind the scenes. They view stablecoins as a potential backbone for cross-border expansions, micropayments, and eventually new forms of consumer loyalty or identity. With 400 million active accounts worldwide, PayPal thinks of itself as the “first big wallet,” but it’s very aware of competition from everyone else. By leaning into stablecoins, PayPal is aiming to remain not just the wallet for eBay (which was once the original synergy) but for thousands of merchants who want more advanced rails.
They also see AI as critical for personalization and risk management. While not as explicit about “agentic AI” as Stripe, the subtext is that next-generation AI engines will shape how PayPal’s platform can automatically tailor offers, reduce false positives, or identify top customers. Essentially, even if we never see the phrase “agentic AI” in PayPal’s deck, the same shift is happening: letting AI do more real-time decision-making on user flows and transactions.
Why Stablecoins Are Actually a Big Deal
At this point, you might wonder: if stablecoins have been around for years, why the sudden mainstream acceptance? One reason, spelled out in Visa’s letter, is that the underlying blockchains and stablecoin implementations have gotten cheaper and faster. Another is that the discussion is no longer limited to crypto trading. Instead, stablecoins are seen as “digital dollars” that can be moved globally in near real-time, often at a fraction of the cost of wires.
Stripe says stablecoins matter because they “make money movement cheaper, faster, decentralized, and open-access.” If you’re a CFO, stablecoins might simplify treasury management or let you skip slow, expensive cross-border rails. If you’re a consumer in an emerging market, stablecoins can let you hold dollars even if your local currency is depreciating. If you’re a developer building an AI agent that needs a frictionless way to pay freelancers in multiple countries, stablecoins are theoretically simpler to integrate than signing up for a patchwork of local payment providers. The big question is always: will regulators hamper stablecoin adoption? For now, these four major firms believe that stablecoins have enough clarity—and enough real utility—to become a standard payment option.
Agentic AI: A Payment Revolution?
The concept of “agentic AI” has been getting buzz in tech circles, especially with the rise of ChatGPT and GPT-4. But it’s Stripe that’s describing the potential for self-directed “critters” that carry out tasks on your behalf, including spending money. Is that safe? Stripe’s approach is to integrate with their Issuing product, which can spin up or destroy virtual cards dynamically. The end user decides the budgets, constraints, or triggers for a given AI. Then the AI does the rest, such as ordering supplies, renewing subscriptions, or paying monthly bills. PayPal and Adyen are likewise rolling out advanced ML or AI engines that do some level of real-time decision-making on fraud or risk.
From my vantage point, it’s not a big leap to see these AI modules branching out from risk management to actual day-to-day commerce. We might see advanced “buying agents” that fetch the best deals automatically or negotiate reorders for a business. We might see something like Adyen’s “Uplift” tool morph into a more general AI that not only decides how to route a transaction to minimize cost and maximize approvals but also uses advanced pattern recognition to preempt shipping or inventory snags. The underlying idea: with a big enough data set, an AI might eventually reduce or remove entire layers of manual overhead. Just as we once thought of robots as purely physical, now we’re seeing “digital robots” that can take real actions in the realm of payments.
Still, these same expansions raise policy and operational questions. Who’s liable if an AI overspends or is exploited? That’s why Stripe touts guardrails and “spending constraints” for autonomous agents. If you imagine a small business that sets an AI in motion, you’d want strict approval thresholds and real-time alerts for anything unusual. Indeed, PayPal’s expansions into dynamic risk scoring might be essential if AI-driven commerce becomes normal. For big or small players alike, the race to harness AI is partly about user delight (doing more with less friction) and partly about ensuring it all remains secure. This is the tension all these companies are grappling with: the unstoppable shift to agentic commerce versus the duty to keep finances safe.
Connecting the Dots: Unified Platforms, Global SMBs, and More
Looking across all four letters and presentations, we see a few unifying themes.
First, each company is pushing beyond pure card acceptance into more flexible payment rails. Stripe invests in stablecoin orchestration; Visa calls themselves a “network of networks”; Adyen doubled down on its strategy as one single platform; PayPal’s efforts in integrating its multiple systems and brands as one. Part of this is simply adjusting to the fact that younger consumers and younger businesses are comfortable with more ways to pay and get paid.
Second, each sees a broad-based future where every type of business, from e-commerce giants to physical retailers, from SaaS providers to content platforms, can unify all their financial streams in a single platform. Stripe calls this “machine commerce,” bridging digital and physical. Adyen calls it “unified commerce.” Visa calls it “Visa-as-a-service.” PayPal calls it “power every payment.” The brand language differs, but the underlying aim is consistent: to become the single point of integration for all the new ways money might move. Traditional card volume still matters, of course, but is now considered just one piece in a much bigger puzzle.
Third, the big story about stablecoins and AI is that they can create entirely new flows of money. For instance, stablecoins might turn cross-border pay-ins and payouts from multi-day processes into near-instant ones. That could attract new participants in e-commerce who previously found it too expensive or slow. Meanwhile, AI agents can do tasks we used to need humans for—managing subscription churn, scanning for price anomalies, or bridging supply chain data with payments data. That synergy might produce new forms of small business financing or new aggregator platforms that handle logistics plus payments plus marketing. It’s a huge scope.
In short, it seems that the lines that used to separate banking, payments, AI automation, and global e-commerce are blurring. Each major firm is racing to bundle them into a coherent offering. The fact that all four share a broadly similar view suggests we’re at a real inflection point.
Where Does This Lead?
If we try to see a few years ahead, we can start imagining that stablecoins become a default settlement option for many cross-border scenarios, while agentic AI becomes a normal part of any enterprise’s finance stack. Maybe you’ll see an AI that manages your everyday payables, scanning for the cheapest rails for each transaction, whether that’s a direct bank transfer, a stablecoin, or a card network. Meanwhile, in consumer-facing contexts, small “buying bots” might expedite e-commerce or handle subscription sign-ups and cancellations. Over time, “agentic commerce” could become as routine as using a web browser is today.
There are, of course, unknowns. Regulatory landscapes for stablecoins vary widely by region. AI, too, is subject to privacy and liability concerns that might slow adoption. But the fact that Stripe, Adyen, Visa, and PayPal—which collectively move trillions of dollars a year—are forging ahead is itself a powerful market signal. If CFOs and merchants see reliable cost savings, they’ll adopt stablecoins. If user experience is improved by letting AI handle everyday tasks, consumers will sign on. The combination might well give birth to an ecosystem in which money flows more freely, with fewer overhead costs and more real-time intelligence.
For those working in or around the fintech world, this moment can feel both exhilarating and daunting. On one side, the “plumbing” of finance is becoming infinitely more flexible—multiple rails, multiple ways to route, new programmatic layers. On the other side, the competitive bar is rising sharply: the winners will be those that can deliver these advanced features (like stablecoin acceptance or agentic AI) without sacrificing reliability or losing trust. And no brand can afford downtime. Stripe, Adyen, Visa, and PayPal each hammered home the importance of near-perfect uptime, especially in surges like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, where tens of thousands of transactions hit per second.
Final Thoughts
On the surface, stablecoins and agentic AI might seem like separate, futuristic topics. Yet gleaning insights from these companies shows that both are converging into the mainstream, shaping how payments will work for everyone from massive enterprises to scrappy new startups. In so doing, they might just transform the day-to-day user experience for millions (or billions) of people, whether that’s by letting you hold your money in a global digital dollar or letting your AI handle subscription renewals while you sleep.
It’s important to note that all these companies maintain a measured perspective: the transformation won’t happen overnight. Traditional bank accounts, major card networks, and typical e-commerce flows aren’t going anywhere in the short term. But the sense of unstoppable momentum is there. As a professional reading these letters, it’s hard not to conclude that we should be preparing for a world in which “programmable money” and “automated commerce” are the norm. That might mean rethinking everything from how we handle treasury to how we design user flows.
If you’re looking for the single biggest takeaway, it’s this: the future of fintech isn’t just about incremental improvements in risk or checkout. It’s about unleashing new forms of money movement (stablecoins) and new forms of economic actors (AI-based agents). Once these tools become easy and trusted, we could see entirely new channels of commerce appear. The next few years will decide which fintech companies can capture that potential—and how quickly businesses and consumers embrace it. But from Stripe’s profit-laced optimism to Visa’s stablecoin evangelism, from PayPal’s super-app expansions to Adyen’s data-driven push into real-time rails, we can see that no matter how uncertain the future can seem, this is one area where the major players largely agree: a new era is already unfolding.