Visa Bets Cardholders Will Turn to AI for Financial Advice

Credit cards have long helped consumers pay for purchases. Now Visa wants them to help consumers decide how to spend their money.

During the Visa Payments Forum, the company unveiled AI Financial Assistant, a tool that lets cardholders chat with an AI assistant within their banking app about topics such as spending habits, budgeting recommendations, and personalized offers from their bank. The tool will be available for pilot programs with U.S. financial institutions starting in August.

AI Financial Assistant is part of Visa’s Digital Enablement suite, which bring AI capabilities to issuing banks already using Visa services for areas like data analytics, fraud prevention, and security. The launch also highlights Visa’s competition with Mastercard and other issuer infrastructure providers, all of which are racing to build an intelligence layer that helps financial institutions make better use of their customer data.  

Working from the Data

Visa’s AI Financial Assistant is designed to capitalize on the financial insights banks already have about their cardholders. If a customer asks for help creating a savings plan for a major purchase, for example, the assistant can generate recommendations using the customer’s existing banking data rather than requiring them to manually input or import financial information. 

Visa is also positioning the service as a more secure alternative to third-party financial apps. Because the assistant operates directly within an issuer’s banking app, customers don’t have to connect their bank account information to an outside service.

For Visa and its banking partners, the value extends beyond improving the customer experience. By encouraging consumers to discuss future purchases and financial goals, the assistant can give banks a richer picture of customers’ intentions, potentially informing everything from product recommendations to lending opportunities.

“The strategic play here is to grow and deepen Visa’s relationship with a given bank, while using its experience developing AI tools on its own data as well as insights Visa has derived from its own data to deliver tools that can learn from the bank’s data,” said Christopher Miller, Lead Analyst of Emerging Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. 

“Most consumers have a bigger suite of financial institutions with whom they do business,” he said. “The tool Visa is releasing here is aimed at banks, not consumers, and solves a bank problem—how do we provide AI Assistant services to our customers?—rather than a customer problem: how do I get an overview of my entire financial situation? It’s also leveraging the real trust that consumers might have in some existing financial relationships.”