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Visa is cutting roughly 2.6K jobs, or about 7% of its global workforce, with most cuts hitting its technology and product teams.
CEO Ryan McInerney announced the move in a staff memo on Tuesday, the same day the company was scheduled to report quarterly earnings.
AI played a significant role in the decision, but wasn't the sole driver, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
"To capture the opportunities ahead and best position Visa to lead this transformation, we must continue evolving how we work."
Ryan McInerney, Visa
McInerney cited AI as accelerating the evolution of how work gets done at Visa, while also pointing to a broader industry shift.
He described the current moment as a "once-in-a-lifetime inflection point" in payments, driven by new technologies changing how money moves globally.
Visa plans to redirect resources toward its highest-potential growth areas.
Those include affluent customers, cross-border payments, business remittances, stablecoins, and geographic expansion, according to people familiar with the company's plans.
The company operates a digital payments network across more than 200 countries and territories.
Its business model depends on transaction volumes rather than credit risk, which analysts say insulates it from economic downturns.
The cuts follow a similar move by Mastercard, which recently announced plans to reduce its global workforce by 4%, also citing the need to refocus investments.
PayPal Holdings has separately announced plans to cut 20% of its workforce, and Block said in February it would eliminate roughly 4K jobs.
Analysts at Evercore ISI called Visa's move routine, describing it as "one of the best-run companies in the world tweaking headcount and costs and reallocating money and resources into areas of higher growth and returns."
