Who are Visa's decision-makers?

Ryan McInerney became CEO in February 2023, succeeding Alfred Kelly Jr. McInerney joined Visa in 2013 from JPMorgan Chase, where he ran consumer banking — a $14 billion revenue business with 75,000 employees — after starting his career as a McKinsey partner in the retail banking and payments practice. His 2025 compensation totaled $31.56 million, a 21% raise reflecting Visa's strong FY2025 performance. His operating background is large-scale consumer financial services, and his strategic focus has been on new flows (B2B, real-time payments) and agentic AI commerce.

The technology and product layers are led by two executives with deep enterprise software roots: Rajat Taneja (President, Technology), who spent 15 years at Microsoft running commerce technology before joining Visa in 2013 and was previously CTO of Electronic Arts; and Jack Forestell (Chief Product and Strategy Officer), who spent 12 years at Capital One building digital banking and mobile payments and architected the Visa Intelligent Commerce and OpenAI agentic commerce programs. CFO Chris Suh arrived in August 2023 from Electronic Arts, where he was CFO, and before that was CVP/CFO of Microsoft's Cloud + AI group (Azure and Dynamics). The shared Microsoft and EA background across the C-suite reflects Visa's deliberate push to operate as a technology platform company.

For enterprise technology procurement, Visa's buying committee typically involves the functional owner — Rajat Taneja's organization (President, Technology) for infrastructure, cloud, security, and developer tooling; Jack Forestell's team (CPSO) for product tooling, analytics, and AI; Chris Newkirk's organization (CEO, Commercial & Money Movement Solutions) for anything touching Visa Direct, B2B Connect, or cross-border payments — alongside a Finance business partner and a Sourcing/Procurement function that gates large deals through legal and security review.

For partnerships that touch the VisaNet network, data, or payments infrastructure, deals escalate to the C-suite quickly. Oliver Jenkyn (Group President, Global Markets) and his five regional presidents hold P&L authority over consumer payments growth deals in their markets. The Chief Risk and Client Services Officer is a critical stakeholder for any solution touching fraud, compliance, or client data. Andrew Torre (previously leading Value-Added Services under the McInerney restructuring) oversees the VAS segment. For AI tooling specifically, Forestell's team is the primary entry point given Visa's active Intelligent Commerce and OpenAI integration programs.

Visa operates as a matrix organization with functional C-suite leaders (CFO, CPSO, President of Technology, General Counsel, CHRO) alongside business unit CEOs (Commercial & Money Movement Solutions under Newkirk) and regional market presidents (Global Markets under Jenkyn, covering five regional presidents). This model allows global consistency on VisaNet while enabling local market customization and autonomous P&L accountability at the segment level.

As of September 30, 2025 (FY2025 year-end), Visa employs approximately 34,100 people — up 7.9% from 31,600 in FY2024, reflecting investment in engineering (particularly AI, agentic commerce infrastructure, and VisaNet +AI) and integration of Pismo, Tink, and the Argentina acquisitions. The majority of engineering headcount is concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area (Mission Rock HQ), Austin TX, Atlanta GA, and Bengaluru India.