Visa one announced reduction of the workforce by approximately 2,600 employeesequal to approximately 7% of the overall workforce. The reorganization is interesting especially the teams involved in technological and product developmentwhile the freed economic resources will be allocated to initiatives considered strategic for the evolution of the business, including consumer payments, cross-border transactions, corporate payments and stablecoins.
The decision was communicated to employees through an internal note signed by CEO Ryan McInerney, anticipated by Bloomberg and subsequently confirmed by the company. The cuts mainly affect the technology divisions, traditionally responsible for developing the infrastructure on which Visa’s payment network is based.
In the message to employees, McInerney he also cites artificial intelligence as one of the elements that is accelerating the company’s transformation. The CEO emphasizes that AI helps speed up the evolution of activities and the way work gets done, without directly attributing responsibility for staff reductions to technology.
According to a source familiar with the situation, cited by CNBC, artificial intelligence would still have played a significant role in the reorganizationalthough it does not represent the only reason. The company is in fact using AI tools to automate repetitive tasks And reduce product development timesachieving greater operational efficiency.
The most relevant aspect of the strategy, however, concerns the destination of the investments. Visa means it strengthen its presence in international paymentsin solutions dedicated to businesses and above all in the field of stablecoinstools that could profoundly change the digital payments market.
In fact, stablecoins allow you to transfer value directly between two entities without the need to use traditional payment card-based networks. At the same time, new models are emerging, such as automated payment systems via software agents (“agent checkout”), which could redefine the role of intermediaries in commercial transactions.
Visa’s choice therefore reflects its desire to invest in technologies that could represent a transformation of the sector, even when these have the potential to reduce the weight of the traditional infrastructure built by the company itself. More than a contradiction, the company seems to interpret this strategy as a way to maintain a central role also in the future evolution of payment systems.
However, Visa is not the only company in the sector to have started a review of its organizational structure. In recent months, PayPal, Block and Mastercard have also announced staff reductionsin a context in which numerous technology companies are trying to transform investments in artificial intelligence into greater operational efficiency.
Despite the 2,600 redundancies, the scale of the intervention remains limited compared to the growth recorded by the company in the last decade. Visa’s workforce has in fact tripled to approximately 34,100 employees, making the current reduction a rationalization intervention rather than a structural downsizing.
