Varun Mahindru, Head of Value-Added Services for Southeast Asia at Visa, believes that payment itself has become the least visible part of the payments value chain. His view is is driven by how fraud intelligence, innovation platforms and digital trust infrastructure are evolving beneath what appears to consumers as a simple, seamless payment experience. From his perspective, the most meaningful changes in payments are no longer defined by authorisation, clearing and settlement alone, but by the underlying infrastructure that determines how securely, intelligently and flexibly commerce operates.

“When we talk about beyond the transaction, a payment today is quite invisible,” he said. “But underneath that transaction, there are many systems working.”

That changes how payment ecosystems should be understood. What was historically viewed purely as transaction processing infrastructure is now evolving into a broader foundational layer, encompassing risk intelligence, product innovation, orchestration and trusted digital identity.

The implications are significant. Banks face rising customer expectations, increasingly diverse payment behaviours, more embedded commerce models and rapidly evolving fraud sophistication. Payments are expected to feel seamless, but the infrastructure beneath them is becoming more strategically important.

For Mahindru, the institutions that remain relevant will be those that understand where competitive value is actually shifting.

Why is fraud intelligence becoming a business enabler?

Fraud prevention was historically treated as a control discipline.

“Risk and fraud used to be considered a cost centre,” Mahindru said.

That reflected an older payments environment in which fraud systems were often designed primarily to block suspicious transactions, even if that created friction for legitimate users.

Mahindru argues that this model is becoming less effective because modern fraud increasingly resembles genuine customer behaviour. The strategic challenge is no longer simply detecting bad transactions, but distinguishing suspicious activity from legitimate commerce with greater precision.

“The challenge now is not just to stop transactions, but to decipher which are the good transactions we should let through,” he said.

That materially changes the role of fraud infrastructure. Better fraud intelligence can reduce losses, but it can also improve customer experience, approval rates and ecosystem trust by allowing more legitimate commerce to proceed with less friction.

Mahindru pointed to Visa’s Featurespace capability as an example of this shift. Rather than relying primarily on static rules or conventional scoring models, it builds behavioural profiles using financial and non-financial signals to identify activity that falls outside expected patterns.

The commercial impact can be meaningful. Mahindru said issuers in Asia Pacific using Visa Risk Manager have seen fraud reductions approaching 30%. In that context, fraud intelligence increasingly supports growth as much as control.

Why are banks modernising payments differently?

Payments modernisation is often associated with large-scale transformation programmes.

Mahindru takes a more selective view.

“The biggest thing we say is it’s not about a full platform transformation.”

That reflects practical reality. Many banks operate deeply embedded legacy estates tied to regulatory requirements, operational dependencies and established product ecosystems. Full replacement programmes can be expensive, disruptive and operationally risky.

Instead, Mahindru sees stronger progress where institutions modernise selectively, using modular infrastructure to launch newer products, test innovations or support changing customer expectations without attempting immediate wholesale replacement.

That represents a more pragmatic modernisation model. The strategic question becomes less about rebuilding everything and more about creating faster innovation capability around targeted business opportunities.

For institutions under pressure to improve resilience, responsiveness and product agility, that may prove the more commercially realistic path.

How does modular infrastructure change innovation speed?

Mahindru points to Pismo as an example of modular innovation infrastructure.

“Pismo is a cloud-native, microservices-based platform. It’s fully application programming interface (API)-driven,” he said.

The significance lies less in the architecture itself than in the operating flexibility it enables. Legacy systems often constrain how quickly institutions can launch products, adapt to changing customer behaviour or integrate new payment experiences.

Mahindru noted that Pismo’s operating model allows for significantly faster release cycles than traditional infrastructure.

He cited flex credential as a practical example. Rather than requiring separate payment instruments, multiple funding sources such as debit, credit or loyalty balances can sit behind a single credential.

Launching propositions like that becomes materially easier when infrastructure is modular, configurable and capable of faster iteration.

The broader strategic point is not the platform itself. It is the commercial agility that more adaptive infrastructure can unlock.

Why are payments becoming multi-rail ecosystems?

Payment behaviour is becoming increasingly multi-modal.

Card rails remain important, but account-to-account transfers, quick response (QR) payments, wallets and embedded payment experiences increasingly coexist across markets, use cases and customer segments.

Mahindru explicitly positioned Visa’s approach around broader ecosystem enablement rather than narrow scheme dependency.

“One of the things Visa is focused on is being payment and scheme agnostic.”

That is strategically important. Competitive advantage increasingly depends less on controlling a single payment rail and more on enabling orchestration across multiple interaction models.

“We are beyond just that Visa transaction,” he said. “It is actually helping our partners innovate on all fronts.”

That reflects how payment ecosystems are evolving. Banks increasingly need infrastructure capable of supporting different payment behaviours, funding models and customer journeys without forcing users into rigid product structures.

The competitive question becomes less about efficient single-rail processing and more about enabling flexible commerce across increasingly multi-modal payment environments.

Why does agentic commerce change the trust equation?

Artificial intelligence introduces a more structural shift.

Mahindru sees agentic commerce as one of the next major changes in payments. In such environments, autonomous digital agents may search, compare, decide and transact on behalf of users.

That creates efficiency opportunities, but it also raises a more fundamental trust question.

“What remains really important is the trust layer,” he said.

Merchant ecosystems need confidence that incoming agents are legitimate. Consumers need confidence that payment credentials remain protected. Financial institutions need confidence that automated activity remains governed and secure.

“You need a trusted agent protocol,” Mahindru said.

He identifies network tokenisation as foundational infrastructure for that future. Rather than exposing underlying credentials directly, tokenised payment identity creates a more secure framework for automated commerce interactions.

Visa’s Agentic Ready programme, introduced across Asia Pacific, is intended to help issuers prepare their infrastructure for that emerging environment.

Mahindru also sees an important inflection point: in a more automated commerce landscape, readiness may define who captures spend, much as digital wallet positioning influences payment behaviour today.

Why does value increasingly sit beneath the transaction?

Mahindru’s core argument is that payment value is migrating beneath the visible customer interaction.

The transaction itself remains essential, but differentiation increasingly lies in the infrastructure that makes payments safer, smarter, faster and more adaptive.

Fraud intelligence is becoming core commercial infrastructure. Modular platforms improve innovation speed. Multi-rail orchestration becomes more important than single-scheme execution. Trusted digital identity becomes essential as commerce becomes more automated.

“The quicker you are ready, the quicker you can be part of that ecosystem,” Mahindru said.

For Mahindru, the institutions that remain strategically relevant will be those that control the intelligence, trust and orchestration layers beneath the transaction, rather than simply the transaction itself.