⚠ Standards Bodies Are Writing the AlternativeModerate threat

Visa (V) — threat to the moat

A neutral token keeps the security and loses the anchor, and the parties who want one are the ones with growing leverage.

Tokenisation is not conceptually proprietary, and the parties with the most to gain from a neutral version of it are the largest merchants and the wallet platforms — exactly the counterparties whose leverage is growing. Standards work on network-agnostic tokens and delegated credential management continues in several forums.

What a neutral token standard would unanchor1.4bn+Visa cards currently tokenised600+Issuers in the programmeThe security benefit survives a neutral standard; the anchor does not
The decision is made once per merchant and rarely revisited, so the next few years of share will hold for a decade.

If a neutral standard arrives at scale, the security benefit remains across the more than 1.4 billion cards already provisioned1 and the lock-in does not. Visa would keep selling a competent tokenisation product into a market where the customer can switch token providers without re-collecting anything.

The measure is which token service the large merchants and platforms actually adopt — Visa's or an intermediary's. It is a decision made once per merchant and very rarely revisited, so the market share of the next few years is likely to hold for a decade.

References
  1. ReportedIf a neutral standard arrives at scale, the security benefit remains across the more than 1.4 billion cards already provisioned
    Visa 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 ↗
Sources
Generated September 23, 2026