Visa is winning the AI race in payments, but the question is whether it will pay off

• Evident released its first index for AI maturity in the payments industry.
• Major brands like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal snagged the top spots, but fintechs are close behind.
• The industry is investing heavily in talent — but all of the companies share one potential red flag.

Visa is winning the AI race in the payments industry, according to a brand new ranking — but no company is revealing quite how much the technology is paying off.

A brand-new index from Evident, a company that tracks AI in finance, lists Visa as no. 1 among 12 global payments companies. Mastercard and PayPal follow in second and third place. Fintech giants like Stripe and Block rank fifth and sixth on the index, demonstrating how quickly newer players have built serious AI firepower.

"With relatively nascent industry players like Stripe and Block performing well — and showing their AI potential reflected in their valuations — the Index leaders cannot afford to drop off the pace," Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and co-CEO, said in a press release.

Payment companies — which move money around between banks, businesses, and consumers — run on technology. Evident's new industry ranking, released Wednesday exclusively to Business Insider, reveals how the companies we interact with every day are using AI, from deciding whether a transaction goes through to detecting fraud.

Whether ranked No. 1 or dead last, all of the companies have at least one thing in common: none have published their achieved or projected ROI across all their AI efforts. By comparison, 10 of the 50 banks that Evident tracks already share those figures.

"The absence of ROI disclosure — or any group targets for AI ROI — is increasingly conspicuous," Annabel Ayles, co-founder and co-CEO of Evident, said. To justify their expenses, the market will "sooner or later demand clearer evidence of value."

Together, the dozen companies documented almost 100 AI use cases over the past two years, but the top three punch above their weight — they were responsible for more than half of the use cases recorded in the index. Visa and Mastercard are particularly advanced in using AI for fraud detection and cybersecurity.

Visa, in its 2025 annual report, acknowledged AI competition, noting that some competitors will beef up their products and others will offer employees AI tools.

"If we do not continue to invest in developing and supporting our AI-based initiatives, we may fall behind technological developments," the report said.

Visa has invested more than $3.5 billion in AI and data over the past decade and employs more than 2,500 technologists working on innovations, including over 300 AI models in production, chief data officer Andres Vives told Business Insider in a statement.

Top firms staffing up aggressively

The index doesn't focus on specific use cases; instead, it evaluates companies on four criteria: talent, innovation, leadership, and transparency.

Talent has the biggest impact on each company's ranking, and the report found that the payments industry overall is investing heavily in AI and data hiring. Compared to other financial institutions, the index found that they have 30% more AI-focused workers, even though they generally have smaller workforces. Among the 12 ranked companies and their more than 335,000 employees, an average 6.5% are focused on AI, Mousavizadeh told Business Insider. That 6.5% figure, she added, is the highest concentration of AI talent Evident has found across the sectors it tracks.

PayPal alone accounts for 18% of the AI talent among the indexed companies and employs more than 4,000 AI workers. Stripe and Block also stand out for their density of AI employees, who make up more than 10% of their total workforce.

Payments companies aren't alone, of course, in focusing on AI talent — technologists specializing in AI are among the most in-demand jobs in the broader financial sector.

The gap in ROI transparency

Leaders at bulge-bracket banks are already facing questions about when they will see AI investments pay off—analysts, for example, pressed JPMorgan leaders on the merits of the bank's massive technology spending during a recent earnings call. Jamie Dimon, the bank's CEO, acknowledged tech competition from fintechs on that call, and again from payments companies during the investor conference in February, name-dropping Stripe and PayPal.

For now, AI's benefits at payments companies are often baked into existing performance measures, such as lower transaction costs, according to the index.

But there are still demands to stay competitive. Evident found that agentic capabilities will likely play a bigger role as companies move from using AI for "defensive necessity to strategic advantage." (Both PayPal and Mastercard teased AI agents in recent earnings calls, and Visa mentioned the potential of agentic commerce during its fourth-quarter earnings call.)

Overall, Evident found that the payments companies that moved fastest on AI are furthest along in their journeys, and the next competitive milestone may be in financial transparency: the first one to publish comprehensive ROI measures will become another type of "first-mover."

Here's the full ranking: