Stripe, Adyen and the Companies That Pay the TollWide moat
Visa (V) — moat facet
Enormous capital went into payments innovation and essentially all of it concluded that connecting to the network beats replacing it.
Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Block and the rest of the modern payments industry sit between merchants and the networks. They compete ferociously with each other on integration, authorisation rates and pricing, and they compete with Visa on almost nothing: every card transaction they process runs across a card network - Visa's reaches more than 175 million merchant locations1 - and pays it.
This app covers Adyen in its own right, and the shape of that business makes the point precisely — a single full-stack platform whose entire advantage lies in orchestration, risk and settlement *above* the rails. Its moat and Visa's do not overlap at any point. The same is true of Stripe, whose innovation was developer experience, and of the wallet products, whose innovation was the checkout.
The relationship is not free of tension. Processors build their own tokenisation, push volume toward cheaper credentials where the rules allow, and are the natural commercial allies of any alternative rail that reaches scale — they would rather have two suppliers than one. But structurally they are on the network's side of the ledger, and their growth has been Visa's growth for fifteen years.
The reason this matters to the thesis: it means the competitive threat to Visa is not under-invested. Enormous amounts of capital and talent have gone into payments innovation, and essentially all of it concluded that connecting to the network beats replacing it.
Fifteen years of payments innovation has been built on top of the rails rather than beside them, and every processor that grows sends Visa more volume.
Processors and fintechs route their card transactions through Visa and pay this fee. Its growth keeping pace with their volumes shows them connecting to the network rather than routing around it.
Source: Visa Form 10-Q, Q3 FY2026 ↗- ReportedThey compete ferociously with each other on integration, authorisation rates and pricing, and they compete with Visa on almost nothing: every card traVisa Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 (CIK 1403161), Item 1 Business — the network reaches approximately 12 billion cards, bank accounts and digital wallets and more than 175 million merchant locations across more than 200 countries and territories; nearly five billion payment credentials; clients comprise nearly 14,500 financial institutions; Tap to Pay provisioning is live for more than 1.4 billion Visa credit and debit cards with more than 600 participating issuers; Visa Direct processed more than 12.5 billion transactions for more than 650 partners and can reach approximately 12 billion endpoints through more than 90 domestic payment schemes and more than 60 card and wallet networks; during fiscal 2025, 329 billion payments and cash transactions carried the Visa brand, an average of 901 million a day, of which 258 billion were processed by Visa; the Visa as a Service stack's access layer includes on-demand APIs and an MCP server enabling AI systems to interface with Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs; stablecoins, generative AI and agentic commerce are named as next-generation technologies under investment — FY2025 (year ended 30 September 2025) · publ. 6 November 2025 · source ↗