#245 Rajat Taneja: Visa's President of Technology Reveals Their $3.3 Billion AI Strategy

This episode is sponsored by Thuma. Thuma is a modern design company that specializes in timeless home essentials that are mindfully made with premium materials and intentional details. To get $100 towards your first bed purchase, go to http://thuma.co/eyeonai Visa's President of Technology, Rajat Taneja, pulls back the curtain on the $3.3 billion AI transformation powering one of the world's most trusted financial networks. In this episode, Taneja shares how Visa—a company processing over $16 trillion annually across 300 billion real-time transactions—is leveraging AI not just to stop fraud, but to redefine the future of commerce. From deep neural networks trained on decades of transaction data to generative AI tools powering next-gen agentic systems, Visa has quietly been an AI-first company since the 1990s. Now, with 500+ petabytes of data and 2,900 open APIs, it's preparing for a future where agents, biometrics, and behavioral signals shape every interaction. Taneja also reveals how Visa's models can mimic bank decisions in milliseconds, stop enumeration attacks, and even detect fraud based on how you type. This is AI at global scale—with zero room for error. What You'll Learn in This Episode: How Visa's $3.3B data platform powers 24/7 AI-driven decisioning The fraud models behind stopping $40 billion in criminal transactions What "agentic commerce" means—and why Visa is betting big on it How Visa uses behavioral biometrics to detect account takeovers Why Visa rebuilt its infrastructure for the AI era—10 years ahead of the curve The role of generative AI, biometric identity, and APIs in the next wave of payments The future of commerce isn't just cashless—it's intelligent, autonomous, and trust-driven. If you're curious about how AI is redefining payments, security, and digital identity at massive scale, this episode is essential viewing. Subscribe for more deep dives into the future of AI, commerce, and innovation. Stay Updated: Craig Smith on X:https://x.com/craigss Eye on A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI (00:00) Introduction (02:57) Meet Rajat Taneja, Visa's President of Technology (04:02) Scaling AI for 300 Billion Transactions Annually (05:27) The Models Behind Visa's Fraud Detection (08:02) Visa's In-House AI Models vs Open-Source Tools (10:54) Inside Visa's $3.3B AI Data Platform (12:29) Visa's Role in E-Commerce Innovation (16:24) Biometrics, Identity & Tokenization at Visa (21:14) Visa's Vision for AI-Driven Commerce

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Last year, we detected and stopped over forty billion dollars of fraud with the models we have. But we also take it forward. For example, a typical transaction will go from the merchant to their bank. It comes in real time to us. We send it to the issuing bank that has issued the credit card or the debit card to the consumer. And they then send back their signals to us. We process it and send it to the merchant. Now, in all of that, there are occasions when the communication doesn't occur seamlessly, where maybe there's a telecommunications problem or the the bank has issues on their side. We have trained our models to be able to mimic what they might have done over years and decades of training our model on the data to say,

• 0:45Speaker 00

  how can we stand in and process the transaction so the consumer and the merchant are not impacted?

• 0:50Craig S. Smith?

  Create an oasis with Thuma, a modern design company that specializes in furniture and home goods. By stripping away everything but the essential, Thuma makes elevated beds with premium materials and intentional details. I'm in the process of reorganizing my house, and I'm giving Thuma a serious look for help in renovating and redesigning. Thuma combines the perfect balance of form, craftsmanship, and functionality. With over seventeen thousand five-star reviews,

• 1:29Craig S. Smith?

  the Thuma bed collection is proof that simplicity is the truest form of sophistication. Using the technique of Japanese joinery, pieces are crafted from solid wood and precision cut for a silent, stable foundation. With clean lines, subtle curves, and minimalist style, the Thuma bed collection is available in four signature finishes to match any design aesthetic. Headboard upgrades are available for customization as desired. To get a hundred dollars toward your first bed purchase,

• 2:10Craig S. Smith?

  Go to Thuma, that's T H U M A dot C O slash I on A I. I on A I all run together, E Y E O N A I. So for a hundred dollars off your first purchase, go to Thuma dot C O slash I on A I. That's T H U M A dot C O slash I on A I to receive a hundred dollars off your first bed purchase. I usually start by having you introduce yourself to listeners and then I'll start asking questions from there.

• 2:52Craig S. Smith?

  Introduce yourself to listeners and tell us why Visa is at an A I conference.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  My name is Rajat Taneja. I'm the president of Technology for Visa. And we are one of the original practitioners of A I. And we are delighted to be part of the conversation here in Human X, thinking about the future, helping design the future as well with A I.

• 3:19Craig S. Smith?

  And I know that you guys have used A I for a long time in fraud detection. And I was interested with Gen A I expanding the attack surface for fraud attacks. How are you keeping up with that?

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So A I is in the very fabric of Visa at some level and has been for decades. And if you kind of step back and think about what Visa does, we are one of the world's largest SaaS platforms. One side, we serve 4.7 billion Visa credentials. And on the other side, there are over 150 million merchants. So in a typical year, we will process over 300 billion transactions in real time. And we process about 16 trillion dollars through our network. And so in order to ensure trust between the buyer and the seller,

• 4:23Speaker 00

  it's very important to make sure that they know that the transaction will be authorized correctly, that money will flow accurately. In the case of any dispute, Visa will. Be behind it and we will manage any fraud and make sure we are fully compliant. So AI has helped us in all of these factors through the decades. Our first model was to manage risk in a transaction, as you as you mentioned. But subsequent to that, AI is part of our cybersecurity program, is part of our operational infrastructure. We run at six nines, ninety nine point nine nine nine nine percent uptown.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  And so detecting and finding and being ahead of operational issues, AI is a big tool in that. It's it's across everything we do and has been. And generative AI, of course, takes us into the next generation of AI and we are excited and thrilled to be part of that.

• 5:27Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and and specifically on fraud detection, is it pattern matching and and the uncovering anomalous features in a pattern or or I know it's much more complicated than than you can explain in a few minutes, but what's the basic tool behind fraud detection?

• 5:51Speaker 00

  So we mostly use deep neural nets and at the very core of those is pattern matching and and training the model to understand what a good transaction is and what a bad transaction is so that the good transactions flow through, the bad transactions are stopped and the false positives and false negatives are very minimal. And we use different techniques in that and typically our models are an ensemble model. And risk is one, payment fraud disruption is the other one, enumeration attacks when bad guys steal or have access to a lot of card data and they're trying to figure out which card works and which doesn't and then utilize the ones that are still active to

• 6:35Speaker 00

  do a lot of nefarious things. So they're called enumeration attacks where we are on top of that. E-commerce disruptions, fake sites are set up for for e-commerce, so we are able to signal that. Last year, we detected and stopped over forty billion dollars of fraud with the models we have. But we also take it forward. For example, a typical transaction will go from the merchant to their bank, the acquiring bank. It comes in real time to us. We send it to the issuing bank that has issued the credit card or the debit card to the consumer. And they then send back their signals to us. We process it and send it to the merchant.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Now, in all of that, there are occasions when the communication doesn't occur seamlessly, where maybe there's a telecommunications problem or the the bank has issues on their side. We have trained our models to be able to mimic what they might have done over years and decades of training a model on the data to say, how can we stand in and process the transaction so the consumer and the merchant are not impacted? And that's another use case of a deep neural net that we have been using.

• 7:52Craig S. Smith?

  Is this your own model? Or are you fine tuning an open source model? Or do you partner with Anthropic or somebody like that?

• 8:02Speaker 00

  So for the existing models that we have, and over 100 products of ours have AI, these are essentially predictive AI models, neural nets. We train the models ourselves. We create it ourselves. We run it ourselves. We manage the model in production 100% ourselves. And we have been committed to and a deep believer in AI for over 30 years. During the dark winter of AI, where nobody sort of really believed in it, Visa continued to invest and had deep belief in it. As generative AI has come out, we have been working with generative AI techniques from 2018 onwards, actually. We have embraced six different models right now.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  But we have created an abstraction layer that allows us to add, delete, remove models as they evolve and have an ensemble. And then we connect those to our own data where we need to. And then we enable direct access and through other application layers for various use cases.

• 9:06Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and you know, so Visa unbeknownst to the public has been an AI company.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:13Craig S. Smith?

  Since the nineties, right?

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 9:16Craig S. Smith?

  Uh, is it frustrating that you're not recognized for your AI uh work or potential?

• 9:23Speaker 00

  You know, we're a humble company. We we run behind the scenes. Uh, our goal is to uh uplift everyone everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid. And as long as that mission is being accomplished, we are serving the community, we are serving consumers, we are serving merchants.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  We are okay with us developing quietly our technologies uh and manifesting itself in the seamless experience. Where trust is established and ubiquity is established for consumers and merchants to do business uh in very nice ways.

• 9:59Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, you know, I use uh, it's now called Credit Karma. It used to be called Mint.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:05Craig S. Smith?

  Uh, and you can connect all your uh different accounts and and it downloads your your your balance and adds it all up and does all sorts of things. As those kinds of apps proliferate, it just seems incredible that you can keep track of data flows. It's it's like this spaghetti bowl of uh of connections and micro surf services that are talking to each other. Is is there a, how do you manage that? Is there

• 10:45Craig S. Smith?

  some visualization somewhere or is it all left to the AI uh or NAI system to to keep track of?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  You're absolutely right. Our backend data platform is one of the largest and most sophisticated in the world. And we, in fact, a decade ago, realizing where the puck was going, decided to rebuild it from scratch for the AI era. And it was instrumental in allowing us to do so many innovations that we have done since then. We have spent over three point three billion dollars on this data platform in this time period. And we have over five hundred petabytes of data. And every transactions brings data, every, every API that we expose. And companies like Credit Karma provide data to us in different ways.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Structured data, unstructured data, document data, graphical data. And we have a very systematic way in which we ingest the data, store the data, process the data. And that is processed by AI, by applications and the business logic of those applications. It has great value at the moment the data comes to us, but then over time continues to add value. I liken it to like fresh, let's say, fresh grape juice, which has great value. And then wine, over time, it ages and becomes more and more valuable. So that's the way we have our data. It immediately has instant value.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  And then collectively over time, continues to train and improve our models and our products.

• 12:29Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, everyone these days are looking at agentic systems, multi-agent systems. Are you using agents in this system to track transactions or highlight possible fraud?

• 12:48Speaker 00

  So a lot of our current products that are using generative AI are using the essential underlying technologies of generative AI. And we are seeing the benefits of that in both productivity in software development, in client services, in our business operations, and so on.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  But as you're pointing out, one of the more exciting things that we are envisioning for the future is agentic commerce. That will have a fundamental, profound impact on the way buyers and sellers discover each other and have deeper connections and relationships over time. We are big believers that while a lot of great things have happened over the years in payments, shopping is still in the hunting and pecking and hunting era and it's not as easy.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  And that will be transformed with agentic commerce, the ability to take the mundane aspects of commerce like registering products, warranty, manuals, price matches and things like that, agents helping with that and then bringing the joys and pleasure of commerce, discovering new things, travel, art, music, so on, products in new ways. But the fundamental common constant over there is payments and transaction and how do you enable that with agents talking to agents or an agent representing you? And we are spending a lot of time on this invention and April 30th, we have a major announcement, all this that I hope you will join, the viewers will listen in, where our

• 14:34Speaker 00

  CEO Ryan Beckenner and my colleague Jack Forstall are going to do a product drop. And it's going to be a very exciting day in commerce.

• 14:43Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, but you guys are not an e-commerce platform. Are you headed in that direction?

• 14:49Speaker 00

  We are the platform that supports merchants and acquiring banks and issuing banks. And that platform has to provide the same level of trust and cybersecurity and payment security and ease and reliability, compliance.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  And so we are the underlier and continue to be the

• 15:14Craig S. Smith?

  But when you talk about matching and, and, you know, helping consumers find products,

• 15:23Craig S. Smith?

  is that a function that the Visa will play? Or that's the function that the e-commerce platform plays and you support?

• 15:30Speaker 00

  I think there'll be a lot of innovations in the ecosystem. And we love those innovations and we expose our capabilities through open APIs, which was a big architectural investment we made again about a decade ago to open up our platform. We now have 2,900 APIs. We do about 40 billion API calls a month at the end of last year. And so the innovations will happen on our platform and we will continue to provide seamless capabilities for the transactions to take place accurately, for the clearing to happen, for the settlement to happen, for compliance to happen, risk to be managed.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  But the great deal of innovation inventions will happen by others in the ecosystem partnering with us, partnering with each other and so on.

• 16:23Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, I'm hearing a lot about distributed systems, blockchain,

• 16:32Craig S. Smith?

  identity, you know, registering our identity on the blockchain and all of those things. Is Visa looking toward that? I mean, I still use a card or I use my, my Apple Wallet. But it seems that, that the, the verifying the identity of the user and how the user is paying, whether it's, you know, through what modality, all of that is, is changing very quickly. How do you see that developing?

• 17:08Speaker 00

  I think the change has already begun. I mean, in the face-to-face commerce, you have an identity that is manifested by a physical card and your ID that is needed. We have a chip, there's a lot of information that transmits for us to know you are who you say you are and you can do what you say you want to do. As you move to e-commerce and then agentic commerce, identity will move upstream. You no longer have the physical card. And we've already been investing in that with tokens. We have almost 13 billion tokens now, approaching 13 billion.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  We have been investing in mobile commerce with different mechanisms to authenticate the credential, to authorize, and score the transaction and ensure all the downstream processes work correctly. Now, take that to the next level with the agentic commerce. That's going to be a big area of investment and inventions and innovation. Biometrics will play a big part. Over there, we announced last year Visa Paskets that allows biometrics to be part of this. And then it's going to continue to evolve. And credentials and authentication, an identity, as you're pointing out,

• 18:34Speaker 00

  is a key area of emphasis for us to ensure accurate transactions that the buyers and sellers can trust. The platform will make sure that disputes or frauds and all the other things that are happening can be taken care of.

• 18:48Craig S. Smith?

  On this identification verification is, as you said, I mean, part of it's going to take place at the agentic level. But for personal ID with biometrics, biometrics, I'm sorry. How is that going to work? Is, are you going to use face scans, iris scans, fingerprints, voice prints?

• 19:21Speaker 00

  It depends on the use case. But in many cases, it's all of the above, depending on the device you have that is giving us some information or we are able to collect it in different ways. I'll give you one example of invention we have at Visa. This is for making sure accounts are not taken over nefariously by bad actors.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  By stealing your password and your user ID or by social engineering or phishing doing that. We are able to see how you type.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  And everybody's typing is a very unique signature. So we are able to score it with AI. Behavioral analytics of actually not just the credential itself, but the manner in which the credential was entered. And signal if there is a need for us to do a step up authentication or to rather than the transaction with more details. And that's manifestation of in that particular use case with based on the signals we got. How do we protect the consumer? Because our main session, I would call it the word, is to protect the consumer and the merchants and our ecosystem. And in different areas, it will be a combination

• 20:39Speaker 00

  of what we are able to get and add on to it with our own ideas and innovations.

• 20:45Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, okay. Well, I'm going to ask one more question. What do you see? How do you see the future for an individual who's browsing websites or walking through a store or just imagining something that they want to buy? Do you have a vision for how that's going to develop?

• 21:10Speaker 00

  We just released today a paper in collaboration with the Institute of Future that jointly with us is trying to imagine how will it look like in the future? And it is a very interesting, hot provoking future that is still being developed. And the role we play and how we'll adapt and shape the future is going to be one of the most exciting things around us. But one thing is for sure.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  AI agents are going to play a part. How and what role they're playing are every consumer's consent, every consumer's personal preference, every consumer's comfort with transparency, with managing the privacy of the data by knowing that the value they are getting, whether it is in browsing, whether it is in discovering, whether it's an actual purchasing for you, representing you as a personal assistant. We need to make sure that the trust is maintained and it is fully complied with every law and regulation afterward. We operate in 200 countries and territories and so for us, in this case, as these divulge,

• 22:25Speaker 00

  that confines, that trust, that cyber protection, the payment protection must pad them on. But I think it evolved in very exciting ways. But it's important for us to be looking right now at things that may not work well. That could cause problems and have both the optimistic mindset and the pessimistic minds thinking through that you're shaking the future correctly. But you know, many of the things you said will probably occur sooner than we think right now.

• 22:55Craig S. Smith?

  Create an oasis with Thuma, a modern design company that specializes in furniture and home goods. By stripping away everything but the essential, Thuma makes elevated beds with premium materials and intentional details. I'm in the process of reorganizing my house and I'm giving Thuma a serious look for help in renovating and redesigning. Thuma combines the perfect balance of form, craftsmanship and functionality.

• 23:29Craig S. Smith?

  With over 17,000 five-star reviews, the Thuma bed collection is proof that simplicity is the truest form of sophistication. Using the technique of Japanese joinery, pieces are crafted from solid wood and precision cut for a silent, stable foundation. With clean lines, subtle curves and minimalist style, the Thuma bed collection is available in four signature finishes to match any design aesthetic. Headboard upgrades are available for customization as desired.

• 24:11Craig S. Smith?

  To get a hundred dollars toward your first bed purchase, go to Thuma, that's T-H-U-M-A.

• 24:19Craig S. Smith?

  dot co slash ion AI ion AI all run together E Y E O N A I. So for a hundred dollars off your first purchase, go to thuma dot C O slash ion AI. That's T H U M A dot C O slash ion AI to receive a hundred dollars off your first bed purchase.