Recently, news broke that Visa is piloting a new security standard designed to let AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants securely collect credit card details directly from customers. While the announcement understandably made headlines, the bigger story here isn’t just about Visa: it’s about the rapid evolution of payments and what it means for businesses, platforms, and customers alike.
At Modo, we specialize in orchestrating complex payment flows across providers, geographies, and channels. That gives us a front-row seat to the waves of innovation reshaping how payments happen and how they fail.
So, what does Visa’s chatbot experiment signal for the broader ecosystem?
AI has long been hyped in the payments space, but so far its biggest impact has been behind the scenes: fraud detection, intelligent routing, smart retries. With Visa’s announcement, we’re seeing AI step into the customer-facing layer of payments, acting not just as a backend assistant but as a frontline collector of sensitive payment data.
This opens up exciting possibilities for conversational commerce, especially as more consumers interact with brands via chat, voice, and other emerging interfaces. But it also adds a whole new set of operational, security, and trust questions.
Each time a new payment channel emerges, the number of moving parts — and potential points of failure or risk — increases. For businesses, that means more systems to integrate, more edge cases to handle, and more pressure to ensure that a payment initiated in a chatbot (or a voice assistant, or a wearable) flows seamlessly and securely through the entire stack.
This is where orchestration matters. Without a coordinated approach to routing, retries, and reconciliation, every new channel risks becoming an isolated silo or, worse, a liability.
The Visa pilot is fundamentally about trust: can consumers feel confident sharing their credit card details with an AI assistant? But it’s also about success: will these new channels match or exceed the success rates businesses see with more established interfaces?
We believe businesses and platforms should be asking not just “Can we add this new channel?” but “How will it affect our overall payment performance, costs, and risk exposure?”
At Modo, we help businesses take control of their payment flows across providers, geographies, and channels. We’re excited by innovations like AI-driven payments, but we also know they bring new orchestration challenges.
Our mission is to help businesses:
We’ll be watching the Visa pilot closely, and we’re ready to help businesses navigate the future of AI, payments, and orchestration.
Want to explore how your business can prepare for the next wave of payment innovation?
Let’s talk.