Visa’s acquisition of two Argentine payments platforms — Prisma and Newpay — from Advent International is a story that appears, at first glance, to belong entirely to Latin America. It does not. Decoded through the lens of Visa’s accelerating global infrastructure strategy, the deal sends clear signals about where the network intends to extend its reach — and Singapore, Southeast Asia’s most sophisticated payments laboratory, sits squarely in its crosshairs.
Analysis | 20 February 2026
The Deal in Context: A Network Reclaims Its Infrastructure
To understand the significance of Visa’s move on Prisma and Newpay, one must begin with a piece of corporate archaeology. In 2019, Visa divested a 51% stake in Prisma — then a unified Argentine payments conglomerate — to Advent International at a valuation of approximately USD 1.42 billion, partly in response to Argentine regulatory pressure to reduce Visa’s dominance in the domestic market. Seven years later, Visa is effectively buying that infrastructure back, this time as a leaner, more strategically defined pair of assets: an issuer processing platform (Prisma) and a multi-network real-time infrastructure provider (Newpay).
The terms of the current transaction have not been disclosed, but the strategic logic is unambiguous. Prisma processes more than six billion transactions annually for over 90 Argentine financial institutions, while Newpay manages approximately 300 million transactions per month across instant peer-to-peer transfers, interoperable QR payments, electronic bill payments via PagoMisCuentas, and a network of over 7,000 Banelco ATMs nationwide. Together, they constitute the plumbing of everyday financial life in Argentina — and Visa now owns that plumbing outright.
“This acquisition is an important step for Visa in Argentina, strengthening our client partnerships and advancing innovation across the payments ecosystem.” — Ryan McInerney, CEO, Visa
Critically, Advent retains Payway, the merchant acquiring business, which continues as a standalone platform. The separation is deliberate and illuminating: by acquiring the issuer processing and real-time infrastructure layers while leaving the merchant acquirer independent, Visa secures the upstream architecture of Argentina’s payment ecosystem without assuming the competitive exposure of the merchant-facing end. It is an elegant vertical play.
The Larger Mosaic: Visa’s Infrastructure Acquisitions Since 2023
The Prisma-Newpay acquisition does not exist in isolation. It is the latest tile in a mosaic that Visa has been assembling with unusual deliberation over the past three years. In early 2024, Visa acquired Pismo — a Brazilian cloud-native issuer processing platform — for USD 929 million, a move that immediately repositioned Visa as a direct competitor to legacy core banking processors such as FIS and Fiserv. Later that year, it acquired Featurespace, a real-time AI fraud prevention company, for USD 946 million. Prisma and Newpay complete a triangular architecture: issuer processing capability in Brazil via Pismo; fraud intelligence globally via Featurespace; and now, in Argentina, both issuer processing and instant payment network infrastructure combined.
The strategic thesis animating all of these acquisitions is what industry analysts are now calling the shift from network-as-transaction-processor to network-as-commerce-orchestrator. Visa’s Value-Added Services revenue reached USD 10.9 billion in fiscal 2025, growing at 24% year-on-year — more than double the company’s overall revenue growth rate. The firm has been explicit about its ambition to address a USD 520 billion total addressable market in value-added services, currently captured by processors, consultants, and fraud vendors that Visa’s acquisitions now increasingly displace.
Layered on top of this infrastructure acquisition strategy is Visa’s aggressive pivot toward agentic commerce. The April 2025 launch of Visa Intelligent Commerce, followed by the October 2025 introduction of the Trusted Agent Protocol, positions Visa’s tokenization infrastructure as the authentication and settlement backbone for AI agents that autonomously complete purchases on behalf of consumers. With pilot programs in Asia Pacific anticipated to launch in early 2026, the intersection of Visa’s infrastructure expansion and its AI commerce ambitions has a clear geographic vector.
Why This Matters for Singapore: The PayNow Parallel
The most immediate reason Singapore should pay attention to the Prisma-Newpay transaction is structural. Consider the parallel with Newpay. The Argentine platform provides real-time account-to-account transfers, interoperable QR payments, and electronic bill payments — a functional description that closely mirrors Singapore’s own PayNow ecosystem, which has become the template for Southeast Asia’s broader regional payment connectivity agenda.
Singapore’s PayNow infrastructure, built by the Association of Banks in Singapore and overlaid on the FAST real-time rail, currently connects to PromptPay in Thailand, DuitNow in Malaysia, UPI in India, and various ASEAN QR networks under the Regional Payment Connectivity initiative. This web of bilateral and multilateral linkages — culminating in the April 2025 establishment of Nexus Global Payments (NGP), a nonprofit founded by several central banks to standardise multilateral instant payment system connections — represents exactly the kind of scaled, interoperable real-time payments infrastructure that Visa is now learning to own and operate in Buenos Aires.
This is not coincidental. Visa’s own published research identifies Singapore’s PayNow ecosystem as a case study in real-time payment adoption, and its Visa Protect for Account-to-Account Payments product is already being positioned to overlay AI-driven fraud detection onto PayNow-style A2A networks. The firm’s own Singapore website explicitly cites the PayNow-PromptPay and PayNow-DuitNow cross-border linkages as examples of the RTP ecosystem Visa seeks to serve with its security and fraud intelligence stack.
Singapore’s payments market is valued at USD 25.79 billion in 2026, forecast to reach USD 40.85 billion by 2031 — a 9.63% CAGR — even as PayNow rails increasingly erode card-based transaction volumes.
The competitive dynamic in Singapore is unusually complex precisely because of this. Visa and Mastercard retain strong interchange revenues at the physical point of sale, where terminal ubiquity sustains card preference. But at the digital commerce layer, PayNow-routed account-to-account transfers are absorbing share at a projected 10.62% compound annual growth rate — the fastest of any payment mode. Singapore’s payments market, valued at approximately USD 25.79 billion in 2026 and forecast to reach USD 40.85 billion by 2031, is therefore a site of competitive compression: rising volumes coincide with thinning margins as A2A rails siphon flows that would otherwise traverse card networks.
Visa’s response to this structural challenge in mature markets like Singapore is not to compete with PayNow directly — a battle it would lose given the regulatory and public-sector support behind the national infrastructure — but to become indispensable to it. The Visa Direct product already offers PayNow-adjacent networks access to a global network spanning more than 190 countries, positioning Visa as the cross-border bridge for A2A systems that are inherently domestic in orientation.
Operational and Commercial Implications for Singapore-Based Institutions
For Singapore’s banking sector, the Prisma-Newpay acquisition raises a set of near-term operational questions that deserve careful consideration. The city-state hosts the regional headquarters of several global card networks and payment processors, and its financial institutions increasingly operate across the ASEAN payments connectivity web. As Visa deepens its ownership of issuer processing infrastructure globally, the question of where those capabilities eventually point — and whether Singapore-based issuers might one day be offered Pismo-style cloud-native processing on Visa’s backend — becomes commercially material.
The Pismo integration already demonstrated that Visa is willing to compete directly with the processors that its own bank clients use. If that model is extended, Singapore-domiciled banks that currently run their card issuance and transaction processing through third-party vendors may face the option — or, more pressuringly, the pitch — of migrating onto Visa’s vertically integrated stack. That would represent a significant restructuring of vendor relationships and, potentially, of fee economics.
For Singapore’s fintech sector, the strategic picture is more nuanced but equally significant. Singapore is home to a dense concentration of payment orchestration providers, cross-border remittance platforms, and embedded finance specialists, many of which operate in exactly the white space between global card rails and domestic A2A networks. Companies such as FOMO Pay, StraitsX, and Circle Singapore are building stablecoin and regulated digital currency infrastructure that partially overlaps with the interoperable QR and instant transfer architecture that Newpay operates in Argentina. Visa’s demonstrated willingness to acquire and operate that kind of infrastructure — rather than simply partner with it — is a signal that Singapore-based fintechs operating in adjacent spaces should read carefully.
The stablecoin dimension deserves particular attention. Visa’s own 2026 predictions explicitly name Argentina as a priority market for stablecoin adoption, citing volatile local currencies and the need for stable USD-denominated value stores. The acquisition of Newpay’s real-time payment infrastructure — which handles peer-to-peer transfers, QR payments, and bill payments at scale — creates a natural on-ramp for stablecoin integration if and when regulatory frameworks in Argentina accommodate it. In Singapore, where the Monetary Authority of Singapore has already established a regulatory framework for major payment institution licences and where Project Orchid’s BLOOM trial in November 2025 demonstrated tokenised wholesale deposit settlement, Visa’s Argentina playbook is potentially a preview of how the network might move in Singapore’s own stablecoin-adjacent infrastructure space.
The Agentic Commerce Vector
Perhaps the most consequential long-term implication for Singapore relates to Visa’s agentic commerce agenda. The Trusted Agent Protocol and Visa Intelligent Commerce framework — which enable AI agents to complete purchases autonomously using tokenised Visa credentials — are positioned for Asia Pacific pilot rollout in early 2026. Singapore, with its 92% digital payment adoption rate, high smartphone penetration, and advanced regulatory infrastructure under the Payment Services Act, is the natural first market in the region for this kind of initiative.
The strategic logic is as follows. Agentic commerce requires a trusted, authenticated tokenisation layer to function at scale. Visa, having issued over 16 billion tokens globally by end-2025, controls that layer more comprehensively than any competitor. When an AI agent purchases on behalf of a Singapore consumer at a Lazada storefront or a Grab merchant, it will do so via a Visa token — unless an alternative infrastructure, built on PayNow or stablecoin rails, can replicate both the global acceptance network and the authentication layer that Visa has spent three decades assembling.
The acquisitions of Prisma, Newpay, Pismo, and Featurespace are therefore not simply market-specific plays. They are the sequential construction of a globally interoperable, vertically integrated infrastructure that will form the backbone of agentic commerce when that paradigm reaches mainstream adoption — which Visa itself predicts will occur before the end of 2026. For Singapore’s digital economy, which already operates at the frontier of contactless and QR-based commerce, that timeline is not abstract.
Visa has issued over 16 billion tokens globally. When AI agents begin completing purchases autonomously, those transactions will almost certainly run on Visa rails — unless an alternative achieves comparable scale and global acceptance first.
Regulatory Considerations: The MAS Perspective
Any analysis of Visa’s expanding infrastructure footprint must engage with Singapore’s regulatory environment. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has historically been supportive of innovation while maintaining vigilance over systemic concentration risk. The Payment Services Act framework, which licenses all payment providers and aligns anti-money laundering and cybersecurity rules with FATF norms, creates both a high barrier to entry and, for well-resourced incumbents like Visa, a clear pathway to regulatory credibility.
The MAS will watch Visa’s emerging infrastructure ownership model with interest. On one hand, a vertically integrated Visa — owning issuer processing, real-time infrastructure, fraud intelligence, and now agentic commerce authentication — offers Singapore’s financial system access to world-class capabilities without the fragmentation costs of a multivendor ecosystem. On the other hand, the concentration of critical payment infrastructure in a single network’s hands raises questions about competitive neutrality that the MAS has consistently treated as a first-order policy concern. The regulator’s emphasis on PayNow’s open, multi-bank architecture as a national public good reflects precisely this philosophy.
The shared-liability scam framework that Singapore introduced in 2025, which shifts fraud risk onto institutions and prompts heavier investment in fraud controls, plays directly to Visa’s value proposition with its Featurespace-powered AI fraud detection stack. If Singapore’s banks are spending more on fraud prevention, Visa’s vertically integrated fraud intelligence product becomes a commercially attractive option. Whether the MAS will view that dynamic as competitive innovation or infrastructural dependency is a question that regulators and industry participants alike should be formulating answers to now.
The Deeper Signal: Emerging Markets as Proving Grounds
There is a final, systemic observation that the Visa-Prisma deal invites. Argentina and Singapore could hardly appear more different as payment markets: one is a volatile emerging economy with a history of currency instability, restricted capital flows, and high cash dependency; the other is a mature, highly digitalised city-state with sophisticated regulatory architecture and one of the world’s most advanced cross-border payment connectivity networks. Yet Visa’s acquisition strategy treats both as important nodes in a single global infrastructure.
Argentina, with its Transferencias 3.0 instant payment system, interoperable QR code infrastructure, and now Visa-owned real-time rails, is being used as a proving ground for exactly the capabilities that Visa will eventually deploy in markets like Singapore — not because Argentina and Singapore are similar, but because the technical and commercial challenges they present are structurally analogous. Both involve the coexistence of card rails and account-to-account infrastructure; both present QR code interoperability as a live design challenge; both are testing grounds for cross-border payment connectivity; and both sit within Visa’s explicit stablecoin growth agenda for 2026.
When Visa CEO Ryan McInerney describes the Prisma acquisition as accelerating the deployment of tokenisation, biometric authentication, intelligent risk tools, and agentic commerce solutions in Argentina, Singapore-based payments professionals should understand that they are reading a description of Visa’s global product roadmap, not a geographically bounded ambition.
Conclusion: Reading the Architecture Before the Announcement
The Visa acquisition of Prisma and Newpay from Advent International is, on its surface, a Buenos Aires story. But the infrastructure being assembled — issuer processing, real-time A2A rails, interoperable QR networks, fraud intelligence, and agentic commerce tokenisation — is a global architecture being built one market at a time. Singapore is not immune to that architecture; in many respects, it is one of its most important prospective nodes.
For Singapore’s banks, fintechs, regulators, and payments strategists, the strategic priority is to read this deal not as news from another hemisphere but as an operational signal from a network that intends to be as indispensable to Singapore’s next generation of payments infrastructure as it already is to its card-based present. The companies and institutions that understand this early will be better positioned to negotiate the terms of that relationship — whether as partners, clients, or competitors — on their own terms.
