Visa is winning the AI race in the payments industry, according to the latest rankings, but no company has fully disclosed how much the technology is benefiting them.
A new index from Evident, a company that tracks AI in finance, ranks Visa in second place. One of 12 global payment companies. Mastercard and PayPal follow in second and third place. Fintech giants like Stripe and Block rank 5th and 6th in the index, demonstrating how quickly new players are building serious AI firepower.
“With relatively early industry players like Stripe and Block performing well and their AI potential reflected in their valuations, index leaders cannot afford to slow down,” co-founder and co-CEO Alexandra Mousavizadeh said in a press release.
Payment companies, which transfer money between banks, businesses, and consumers, operate using technology. Evident’s new industry rankings, released exclusively to Business Insider on Wednesday, reveal how the companies we interact with every day are using AI, from determining whether a deal goes through to detecting fraud.
Whether they’re ranked first or last, all companies have at least one thing in common. That’s because no company has publicly announced the ROI achieved or projected across their AI efforts. By comparison, 10 of the 50 banks tracked by Evident already share these numbers.
“The lack of ROI disclosure or group goals around AI ROI is becoming increasingly evident,” said Annabelle Isles, co-founder and co-CEO of Evident. To justify spending, the market will “sooner or later demand clearer evidence of value.”
Together, the 10 companies documented nearly 100 AI use cases over the past two years, but the top three companies outweighed that weight and 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 acknowledged AI competition in its 2025 annual report, noting that some competitors will enhance their products and others will provide AI tools to their employees.
“If we do not continue to invest in the development and support of AI-based initiatives, we may fall behind in technological developments,” the report states.
Visa has invested more than $3.5 billion in AI and data over the past decade and employs more than 2,500 engineers working on innovation, including more than 300 AI models in production, chief data officer Andres Vives told Business Insider in a statement.
Major companies are actively increasing their workforce
This index does not focus on any specific use case. Instead, we evaluate companies on four criteria: people, innovation, leadership, and transparency.
Talent has the biggest impact on companies’ rankings, and the report found that the payments industry as a whole is investing heavily in AI and data adoption. Compared to other financial institutions, the index found that they have 30% more AI-focused employees, even though they generally have fewer employees. Of the 12 companies on the list and their more than 335,000 employees, an average of 6.5% are focused on AI, Mousavizadeh told Business Insider. This 6.5% figure is the highest concentration of AI talent Evident has found across the sectors it tracks, she added.
PayPal alone accounts for 18% of the AI talent of indexed companies and employs more than 4,000 AI workers. Stripe and Block also stand out for their density of AI employees, which make up more than 10% of their total workforce.
Of course, payment companies aren’t the only ones focusing on AI talent. Technologists specializing in AI are among the most sought-after roles in the broader financial sector.
ROI transparency gap
Bulge bracket bank executives are already facing questions about when their AI investments will pay off. For example, analysts pressed JPMorgan executives on a recent earnings call about the merits of the bank’s large technology investments. jamie The bank’s CEO, Dimon, acknowledged technology competition with fintech companies on that call, and again at an investor conference in February, where Stripe and PayPal were mentioned.
So far, the benefits of AI for payments companies are often built into existing performance measures, such as lower transaction costs, according to the index.
However, there is still a need to remain competitive. Evident found that agent capabilities are likely to play a larger role as companies move the use of AI “from a defensive necessity to a strategic advantage.” (PayPal and Mastercard teased AI agents in recent earnings calls, and Visa mentioned the potential for agent commerce in its fourth-quarter earnings call.)
Overall, Evident found that payments companies that were quickest on their AI journey are furthest along, and that the next competitive milestone could be financial transparency. The first company to publish comprehensive ROI measurements will become another type of “first mover.”
