⚠ Reaching Through Rivals' Rails Means Paying TollModerate threat

Visa (V) — threat to the moat

On the last mile Visa is the customer, and customers do not set terms.

Visa Direct's reach depends on connections to more than 90 domestic schemes and more than 60 card and wallet networks1 — infrastructure Visa neither owns nor prices. Where the last mile is a domestic real-time system, that system's operator sets the economics, and several of those operators are the state-built rails that appear in this company's root threats.

Visa Direct’s last mile12.5bn+Transactions, FY202590+Domestic schemes connected60+Card and wallet networksInfrastructure Visa neither owns nor prices
On the last mile Visa is the customer, and several of those scheme operators appear in its own root threats.

Nothing prevents such an operator from pricing the connection unfavourably, or from offering the same disbursement service directly to the same partners. Visa is a customer on that leg of the journey, and customers do not set terms.

This is a volume business built partly on somebody else's floor, which is a reasonable trade while the alternative is not serving the market at all — and a weak position if the floor's owner ever decides to compete.

References
  1. ReportedVisa Direct's reach depends on connections to more than 90 domestic schemes and more than 60 card and wallet networks
    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