By Previn Pillay, Country Manager of Visa Malaysia
Malaysia’s digital transformation has entered a decisive new phase. Commerce is expanding across borders, businesses are digitising at unprecedented speed, and consumers are embracing new ways to shop, pay and engage. Yet this evolution brings rising complexity: identity‑based attacks, increasingly sophisticated fraud, AI‑driven automation at scale, and a progressively fragmented payments landscape.
In this environment, progress in payments can no longer be measured simply by what is faster or more seamless. The real measure is what is secure, reliable, and built to endure. As Malaysia advances towards a digitally led economy, our payments infrastructure must be robust and trusted by design — always on, always secure, and always interoperable.
As one of the world’s most connected networks and a longstanding partner in Malaysia’s financial ecosystem, Visa has both the responsibility and the opportunity to strengthen the foundation of digital commerce and help shape the nation’s payments future. As we look ahead, here are the five fundamentals we believe will define Malaysia’s payments landscape in 2026:
Security as the Foundation for Progress
Security has shifted from being one element of a payments strategy to becoming its defining pillar. Fraud is no longer limited to compromised credentials or stolen devices; it increasingly emerges through identity attacks, impersonation, social engineering and AI‑generated deception. These threats are targeted, coordinated and persistent — designed not just to steal, but to erode trust in the digital ecosystem itself.
When identity is compromised, the effects cascade: consumer confidence weakens, businesses face operational disruption, and trust in digital channels erodes. These are systemic risks requiring ecosystem-wide solutions.
That is why Visa continues to invest in AI‑driven risk models, behavioural analytics, tokenisation, and network‑level intelligence that operate consistently across rails, use cases and borders. Security today is not about reacting; it is about predicting, preventing and protecting at scale, ensuring that every transaction — whether card, account‑to‑account (A2A), wallet or real‑time — moves through a resilient trust layer.
As payment models diversify, Visa’s role is to ensure that security does not fragment. Trust must remain constant, universal and embedded by design. This is the only way Malaysia can scale digital commerce without compromising integrity.
B2B Payments: The Engine for Malaysia’s Digital Growth
While consumer payments have advanced rapidly, the same cannot always be said for business‑to‑business (B2B) payments. Many Malaysian businesses — especially MSMEs — continue to grapple with manual processes, reconciliation delays, limited financing options, and high operational friction. In a region where supply chains and cross‑border commerce are accelerating, these inefficiencies pose real constraints.
For Malaysia’s 1.2 million MSMEs, access to secure and interoperable payment infrastructure is not merely an operational upgrade — it is a pathway to regional competitiveness. As businesses scale digitally, Visa’s focus is to ensure they have the tools, data and trust infrastructure needed to thrive.
Modernising B2B payments is therefore a practical necessity for Malaysia’s next decade of growth. Businesses must be supported with reliable infrastructure that helps them automate payments and reconciliation, manage working capital with precision, transact securely — domestically or across borders — and scale without friction.
This is where Visa plays a central role. Through solutions such as Visa Commercial Pay, Visa B2B Connect, and Visa Direct, supported by virtual cards and cross‑border capabilities, Visa helps streamline financial operations, strengthen control and reduce risk for companies of all sizes.
Connecting Innovation with Stability Through Interoperability
Malaysia’s payments landscape is rich and diverse — cards, wallets, QR, digital currencies and real‑time A2A flows all coexist. Innovation has not produced a single dominant rail, and it likely never will. What separates cohesive systems from fragmented ones is interoperability: the ability for data, identity, and money to move, reconcile and transact securely across platforms, rails, and borders.
Interoperability is more than technical connectivity. It is what allows innovation to scale without eroding trust, ensuring that businesses can digitalise confidently and consumers can enjoy seamless continuity, regardless of how they choose to pay and be paid.
In a region moving toward greater integration — from cross‑border QR initiatives to wider ASEAN connectivity — Malaysia’s competitiveness will depend on secure, seamless interoperability. Visa is committed to enabling this connection in close collaboration with banks, fintechs, merchants, and ecosystem partners, utilising our multi‑rail capabilities and global network to ensure diverse payment systems can work together securely, smoothly and coherently. By working across the ecosystem, we help bridge new payment innovations with established infrastructure, so interoperability can scale without compromising trust.
Whether tapping an e‑wallet, paying by card, or scanning a QR overseas, solutions such as Visa Pay, Visa Accept and Visa Scan to Pay help break down barriers so payments can be completed safely and reliably.
Emerging Technologies Demand Heightened Accountability
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, commerce is entering an agentic era — where AI‑powered systems can be delegated to act on behalf of users, executing tasks such as initiating payments, managing subscriptions, and supporting operational workflows within defined parameters. As automation compresses the distance between decision and execution, payments infrastructure must expand its guardrails to safeguard trust, authenticate, and ensure accountability around every interaction.
Identity frameworks, authentication and governance play decisive roles in this shift. At any moment, consumers and businesses need confidence that a transaction initiated by an AI‑agent is authorised, auditable and aligned with their intent. As agent-initiated interactions become more common, the ability to distinguish trusted agents from unknown or malicious automation becomes increasingly critical.
To support this evolution, Visa has taken a proactive role in helping shape the trust architecture of agent‑driven payments by launching Trusted Agent Protocol. This ecosystem‑led framework is designed to help merchants recognise trusted agents and their declared intent by establishing a verifiable trust frame that allows merchants to verify agent identity, intent, and consumer linkage in real time.
For innovation to flourish responsibly, trust must scale in parallel. Visa continues to invest in technologies that support safe automation — ensuring that as intelligence becomes embedded in payments, the system remains grounded in integrity, interoperability, and user control.
Strengthening Trust in Digital Currencies – The Next Chapter of Payment Settlement
Around the world, digital currencies — particularly stablecoins — are being explored as tools to improve the speed and efficiency of cross‑border payments. Their role is not to replace existing rails, but to augment settlement capabilities where they add clear, governed value. When safely integrated into the financial system, operating under robust regulatory frameworks, and applied to the right use cases, stablecoins can strengthen the integrity of a payments ecosystem.
Against this backdrop, Visa continues to explore tokenised, programmable forms of value as part of a multi‑rail future — ensuring that emerging settlement models are anchored to trusted networks, strong governance and regulatory clarity.
Globally, we are seeing rapid momentum in the use of stablecoins for settlement. What began as limited pilots has scaled meaningfully, with Visa’s stablecoin settlement now running at an annualised pace of over US$4.6 billion and continuing to scale rapidly. This growth underscores the potential for stablecoins to enhance specific cross-border and treasury use cases — particularly where speed, availability and programmability matter — when integrated responsibly into trusted payment networks.
In Malaysia, where financial stability and consumer protection are paramount, any adoption of digital currencies — whether for remittances, B2B flows or treasury optimisation — must ensure that value moves through frameworks grounded in governance, transparency and oversight. Digital currencies should complement the system, not introduce new vulnerabilities.
Encouragingly, the regulatory environment is also evolving constructively. Bank Negara Malaysia is currently conducting regulatory sandbox testing of stablecoin and digital asset initiatives under its Digital Asset Innovation Hub, reflecting a balanced approach that supports innovation while maintaining strong safeguards around financial stability and consumer protection. Together, these developments point to a clear focus on enabling legitimate, use‑case‑driven applications of stablecoins within a well‑governed framework.
From Innovation to Resilience
For Malaysia, the future of digital commerce will not be defined solely by the availability of new payment experiences, but by which innovation can endure and operate securely at scale. Visa’s commitment is clear: as new forms of digital value emerge, they must be able to move securely, reliably and interoperably — across currencies, countries and commercial contexts — just as money has always moved securely across our network.
Our focus extends beyond transactions. Through deep collaboration with regulators to strengthen national security standards, banks and fintechs to accelerate innovation, MSMEs to enable digital participation, and industry partners to build a cohesive multi‑rail future, Visa is proud to help shape Malaysia’s trajectory.
As the nation continues its digital acceleration, Visa remains committed to helping define the future of Malaysia’s digital economy — grounded in trust, strengthened by innovation and built for resilience.
