Visa opens settlement data to DeFi lenders

A card programme's most reliable asset is money it has already earned and not yet received. Settlement receivables are predictable, short-dated and backed by completed transactions, and they have been almost impossible to borrow against, because no lender could see how they performed until after they had settled.

Visa said on September 8 that it is connecting VisaNet settlement data to onchain lending infrastructure, so that lenders financing stablecoin-linked card programmes can underwrite those receivables directly.

The scale behind the announcement is the part worth reading twice. Visa counts more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes on its network, with payment volume on them up roughly 200% year over year. Its own stablecoin settlement volume has passed a $20 billion annualised run rate, a figure the company puts at more than fifteen times where it stood a year ago.

The lending market it is plugging into is larger still. Visa's release puts $694 billion of stablecoin-denominated loans through onchain lending protocols since 2020 — a credit market that grew up entirely outside the banking system and has, until now, had no clean way to price a payments company's cash flows.

"Stablecoins are not only changing how money moves, they're creating opportunities to rethink the financial infrastructure that supports payments," said Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth products and partnerships, in the release.

The model has been running quietly. Visa has been working with Credit Coop, a lending platform that automates funding, collateral management and repayment through smart contracts. That facility has supported more than $2.5 billion in cumulative financed settlement volume since 2023, across more than 3,000 borrow events and 9,000 repayment events, with zero defaults across participating facilities.

Zero defaults over a $2.5 billion book is the number that will get attention, and it deserves a caveat: the collateral is short-dated receivables from completed card transactions, which is close to the safest thing a lender can hold. The absence of losses says less about onchain credit than about the quality of the asset.

Credit Coop's chief executive, Chris Walker, framed the gap the arrangement closes. "Payment companies have always had good collateral in their settlement receivables, but no way to show lenders how it performs in real time," he said.

That is the actual change. Fast-growing payment companies typically fail a traditional credit assessment not because their economics are poor but because they lack operating history. Underwriting against live settlement performance substitutes observable behaviour for the years of audited accounts a bank would otherwise require.

It also places Visa in an unfamiliar position. The company is not lending. It is supplying the data that makes someone else's lending decision possible, which makes its settlement network a credit bureau for a market it does not regulate. That is a durable position, and a quiet one.