Payment networks and bank partnerships: how Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Discover work with banks, and what their AI does

How do card networks work with banks?

A card network does not lend, hold deposits or sign up shops. Visa's FY2025 Form 10-K says it provides “transaction processing services (primarily authorization, clearing and settlement) among consumers, issuing and acquiring financial institutions and sellers in a structure we call the ‘four-party’ model”, and adds: “Visa is not a financial institution. We do not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for account holders.” Mastercard's 2025 10-K names the same four participants (account holder, issuer, merchant and acquirer) and says that “in most cases, account holder relationships belong to, and are managed by, our customers”. The customers are banks. The issuer is the cardholder's bank: it approves each authorization, carries the credit risk and owns the relationship. The acquirer is the merchant's bank: it signs up merchants and sets the merchant discount rate. The network writes the operating rules, switches the messages, settles between the two banks, and runs the fraud scores and tokens that sit inside every authorization.

American Express runs the other model. Its 2025 10-K describes an “end-to-end integrated payments platform”: through its card-issuing, merchant-acquiring and card network businesses it maintains “direct relationships with Card Members (as a card issuer) and merchants (as an acquirer), which provides us with access to information at both ends of the card transaction, distinguishing our integrated payments platform from the bankcard networks.” That is the three-party, or closed-loop, model. It is not closed to banks: Amex says it has relationships with third-party banks and other institutions “in approximately 110 countries and territories”, network partners licensed to issue Amex-branded cards or to acquire local merchants. Those partners accounted for $227.2 billion of processed volume and 66.2 million cards-in-force in 2025. Amex calls itself the fourth largest general-purpose card network by purchase volume, behind Visa, China UnionPay and Mastercard.

Discover has a third structure. Capital One closed its acquisition of Discover on 18 May 2025. Its 2025 10-K groups the Discover Network, the PULSE debit network, Diners Club International and the Network Partners business as the “Global Payment Network”. That makes Capital One the only large US bank that owns a card network. It is the main issuer on Discover, and other financial institutions issue PULSE debit cards and Diners Club cards under licence. The 10-K says Capital One “has substantially completed the reissuance of legacy Capital One customer debit cards onto the Global Payment Network”. On the second-quarter 2026 call, CEO Richard Fairbank said the company was testing Capital One-branded credit accounts on the Discover network, both new originations and conversions of existing accounts (PYMNTS, 22 July 2026).

How do networks and banks make money: interchange, assessments and incentives?

Two kinds of fee are easy to confuse. Interchange moves between the two banks. Mastercard's 10-K says interchange fees “are collected from acquirers and paid to issuers to reimburse the issuers for a portion of the costs incurred”. Visa's says that interchange reimbursement fees (IRFs) “reflect the value sellers receive from accepting our products” and are generally paid by acquirers to issuers. Each network sets default rates that apply when the two banks have agreed no other terms. Neither network keeps the interchange. Visa writes that “the fees we receive from issuers and acquirers are not derived from IRFs or MDRs”, and Mastercard says it administers collection and remittance “through the settlement process”. Network fees are what the network earns, and both banks pay them. Mastercard reports them as assessments. Domestic assessments are driven by domestic volume or the number of cards issued, cross-border assessments by cross-border volume, and transaction processing assessments by the number of switched transactions. In 2025 these came to $11.0 billion, $12.0 billion and $15.9 billion respectively.

The networks also pay the banks to win and keep their card portfolios. Visa booked $15.8 billion of client incentives against FY2025 revenue, and Mastercard booked $20.5 billion of rebates and incentives. That money is why a bank can put a portfolio out to tender between the networks. Under its three-party model, Amex earns the merchant fee itself. Discount revenue, its largest line, was $37.4 billion in 2025, or 2.24% of billed business. On Bank-issued cards running on the Global Payment Network, Capital One's 10-K says “a portion of the amount that merchants pay to the Global Payment Network is passed through to the Bank”. On its Visa and Mastercard cards, Capital One earns interchange whose levels and structure “are set by Mastercard and Visa”.

The networks' own FY2025 figures

Each company defines its metrics differently, so the rows below are not like-for-like. Visa's “payments volume” covers purchases on Visa, Visa Electron, V PAY and Interlink credentials. Mastercard's gross dollar volume (GDV) covers both domestic and cross-border activity on Mastercard-branded cards, excluding Maestro and Cirrus. Amex's “network volumes” include cards issued by its network partners.

For one table with the same definition across networks, Visa's 10-K reprints The Nilson Report (issue 1288, June 2025) for calendar 2024. It covers all credit, debit and prepaid cards for Visa and Mastercard, and only credit and charge cards for the others.

What are the domestic debit networks and push-to-card products?

In the US, debit cards run on two kinds of network. Dual-message networks (Visa, Mastercard and Discover) authorize in one message and clear in another. Single-message networks, which grew out of PIN-based ATM and point-of-sale systems, do both in one message: STAR, NYCE, PULSE, ACCEL, SHAZAM, Visa's Interlink, Mastercard's Maestro and others. Regulation II, the Federal Reserve's rule implementing the Durbin Amendment, does two things. It caps interchange for issuers with $10 billion or more in assets at 21 cents plus 0.05% of the transaction, plus a 1-cent fraud-prevention adjustment. Its routing rule required issuers, by 1 July 2023, to enable at least two unaffiliated networks for online debit as well. This is why a bank's debit network choice is a commercial decision and not a single-brand one. The Fed proposed in October 2023 to lower the cap. In August 2025 a federal district court in North Dakota vacated the fee standard, and a district court in Kentucky later upheld it (Visa 10-K). The 21-cent cap is the one the Fed's own pages still state.

The Fed publishes average interchange by network. For 2024, the average fee on covered transactions (large issuers) was $0.23, or 0.47% of the average ticket. On exempt transactions (issuers under $10 billion plus exempt prepaid) it was $0.51, or 1.21%. That gap is the reason small banks and credit unions, which are exempt from the cap, run debit programs that larger banks cannot match on fee income.

The owner column is shown only where a source on this page states it. The Fed table lists networks and does not name their owners. Visa's 10-K covers Interlink and Capital One's 10-K covers PULSE. Maestro is Mastercard's PIN-based debit brand, per the Mastercard 10-K.

Push-to-card and branded money movement

The networks also run payouts in the other direction. With push-to-card, a bank or platform sends money to a debit card, account or wallet instead of pulling a purchase from it. Visa's 10-K says Visa Direct “began with cards, by taking our existing Visa network and allowing users to receive money to their bank accounts via their debit cards as an endpoint”, then added accounts (through Earthport) and wallets. In FY2025 Visa Direct “processed more than 12.5 billion transactions for more than 650 partners”. It can reach about 12 billion endpoints through more than 90 domestic payment schemes and more than 60 card and wallet networks. Its alias service, Visa+, lets a bank send money to an alias such as a mobile number instead of account details. Mastercard Move is “our collection of money movement capabilities”, and the 2025 10-K gives it a payout reach of “more than 17 billion endpoints globally” across more than 60 originating and 155 receiving countries. Amex's equivalent is consumer peer-to-peer: Send & Split in the Amex App runs through Venmo and PayPal and an Amex Send Account. The product page says cards “issued by other financial institutions are not eligible”, so Amex network-partner banks cannot use it for their own customers.

What AI products does each payment network offer, and when did they launch?

Network AI comes in two generations. The first is fraud scoring inside the authorization message, which the networks have run for decades and sell to issuers as value-added services. In 2019 Visa said it “was the first payment network to apply neural network-based AI in 1993”. It also said Visa Advanced Authorization (VAA) scored 100% of VisaNet transactions in about one millisecond against more than 500 risk attributes, was used by more than 8,000 financial institutions in 129 countries, and helped prevent an estimated $25 billion in annual fraud. Mastercard bought Brighterion, an AI and machine-learning software company, in July 2017. Its 2024 Decision Intelligence Pro release said Decision Intelligence already scored 143 billion transactions a year. The second generation is agentic commerce: the tokens, registration, intent and liability rules that let an AI agent pay with a bank's card. All three networks shipped those within twelve months of each other.

The agentic products look alike because they solve the same problem: how an issuer can tell that an agent's payment is one the customer wanted. Visa uses tokenized credentials with consumer-set controls. Mastercard requires agents to be registered and verified and issues Agentic Tokens. In September 2026 it added a score that estimates whether a transaction was AI-initiated. Amex backs registered-agent purchases with its own purchase protection, and Intent Intelligence moves the customer's signed instructions to the front of the transaction. Its October 2026 release says this is designed to give “issuers greater confidence that an agent is acting as a customer intended”. None of the three has published agentic payment volumes. The bank pilots in the partnership table below are controlled transactions, and Santander and Mastercard said their March 2026 payment was not a commercial rollout.

The fraud figures are the networks' own and are dated. VAA's $25 billion is a 2019 estimate. Decision Intelligence Pro's 20% comes from Mastercard's initial modelling in February 2024. Amex does not publish its fraud rate. It cites The Nilson Report for the lowest US credit card fraud rate among major networks for 19 consecutive years. Payments Dive reported in August 2026 that a Mastercard spokesperson put fraud prevented by its Safety Net application at $77.4 billion since its 2014 launch. For the bank side of fraud AI, see AI fraud detection in banking.

What are American Express's AI innovations and digital wallet strategy in global payments?

Amex's AI argument comes from its structure. Amber Gupta, EVP of Global Decision Science, told Payments Dive in August 2026: “As issuer and acquirer, we can see fraud attacks from different angles and our data feeds directly back into our fraud detection models.” The 2025 10-K puts it in risk language: “Our models and analytical tools help us reduce fraud and underwrite risk.” The same filing says Amex continues to explore uses for generative AI and “the integration of our products and services in agentic commerce”. It warns that AI may produce “false or ‘hallucinatory’ inferences or outputs” and that the EU AI Act and state AI laws in California, Colorado and Utah are “reshaping how we develop, deploy and manage AI systems”. Its July 2026 fraud release credits a “closed-loop network which provides end-to-end visibility into transactions” and dates its first large-scale machine-learning fraud model to 2014.

On digital wallets, Amex places its cards in other companies' wallets and runs the tokenization behind them. It does not push a consumer wallet of its own. The American Express Token Service offers a token vault, token issuing and provisioning, lifecycle management and risk services. The 10-K treats wallet owners as a threat. It warns that companies controlling payment choices “through digital wallets, agentic or other commerce-related experiences” could “suppress use of, or degrade the experience of using our products”, or require Amex to pay to participate. It adds: “As AI technologies are increasingly integrated into payments and related services, such as through the adoption of agentic commerce, these dynamics may accelerate.” Read against that risk factor, the ACE kit (April 2026) and Intent Intelligence (October 2026) are Amex's attempt to make sure AI agents carry its credential, and its purchase protection, instead of being steered to another card. The full record, including Amex's LLM patents, its Resy listing inside Claude and its open roles, is on the American Express profile.

For a bank, Amex is a partner in two ways. It can be a network partner that issues Amex-branded cards or acquires merchants locally under licence in about 110 countries. Or it can be a co-brand partner, mostly as a merchant. Delta, the largest co-brand partner, accounted for about 13% of worldwide billed business and about 21% of Card Member loans at the end of 2025, under an agreement running through 2029. The 10-K also says Amex exited its network business in the EU and Australia because of interchange regulation there.

How does a financial institution partner with a payment network for branded products?

A bank can partner with a network in five ways, and most large banks do several at once. As an issuer, it signs a multi-year network agreement for a card portfolio. The network pays incentives in exchange for volume and exclusivity, and the bank gets the brand, the rules, fraud scores and tokens. As an acquirer, it signs up merchants and pays the interchange. In a co-brand, the bank issues a card carrying an airline's or retailer's brand on top of the network brand. Visa's 10-K says credit cards are “affiliated with programs operated by financial institution clients, co-brand partners, fintechs and affinity partners”. In branded money movement, the bank puts its own name on a remittance or payout service and uses Visa Direct or Mastercard Move as the rail. In BIN sponsorship, a licensed bank lends its network membership to a fintech that cannot issue cards itself.

Visa's partner directory gives the clearest definition of BIN sponsorship: “A BIN sponsor is the issuing bank that owns the Bank Identification Number (BIN), which is necessary to access the Visa network. The issuing bank holds cardholder funds, and takes on the role of managing risk and local country regulations, adhering to Visa rules and often acting as the settlement agent.” The fintech brings the program manager and the issuer processor. The bank brings the licence. That concentration shows in Visa's 10-K, which lists among its settlement risks the failure of “significant sponsor banks through which non-financial institutions participate in the Visa network”. It also shows in US supervision. On 25 July 2024 the Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC issued a joint statement on banks' arrangements with third parties to deliver deposit products, and requested information on bank-fintech arrangements, including payments, while considering “whether additional steps could help ensure banks effectively manage risks”. A bank that sponsors fintech card programs is supervised on that program as its own.

What a branded remittance partnership looks like

In a branded remittance service, the bank's name is on the service, the customer stays in the bank's app, and the network supplies reach. In BMO's case that reach is Mastercard Move, which “enables financial institutions and their customers to easily send money to over 200 destinations in over 150 currencies”. Mashreq says Mastercard Move lets it send “directly in local currencies across new international corridors”, with cash pickup for unbanked recipients. On the Visa side, BPI's release says customers will be able to send money abroad “directly through the BPI app”. The Emirates NBD launch shows the alias model: a sender in the UAE pays a Visa cardholder in another GCC country using a mobile number or 16-digit card number, with QIB in Qatar and Bahrain Islamic Bank and Khaleeji Bank (through BenefitPay) in the first phase. Amex has no equivalent bank-branded remittance product on the record, and its Send & Split excludes cards issued by partner banks.

Which banks have named partnerships with Visa, Mastercard or American Express?

The table below is computed from this site's bank profiles. It lists every curated partner row that names Visa, Mastercard or American Express, with the profile's own status and source, and updates when a profile does. Most entries are agentic-commerce pilots from 2025–2026: US Bank and Citi cardholders on Mastercard Agent Pay, HSBC, Barclays, ING, BBVA, DBS and Santander on Visa Intelligent Commerce or Agent Pay. The rest are network agreements, such as Barclays US with Visa, BOK Financial with Mastercard and PNC with Visa Direct.

Three patterns stand out. First, agentic pilots run through banks as issuers. ING authorized the Visa Payment Passkeys transaction in Germany as issuer, and DBS tested agents paying with tokenized DBS/POSB cards “through issuer-controlled flows”. Second, banks are hedging: HSBC, Santander and ING each appear on both Visa and Mastercard pilots. Third, no bank in the profiles has published volumes or customer counts for agent-initiated payments, so all of these remain pilots or enablement on the record. Fintech issuers on the networks are covered on the fintech profiles. For the networks themselves, see the Visa and Mastercard profiles and the Capital One profile for Discover.

1. Visa Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR), Nov 6, 2025 (sec.gov)
2. Mastercard Incorporated Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR), Feb 11, 2026 (sec.gov)
3. American Express Company Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025 — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR), Feb 6, 2026 (sec.gov)
4. Capital One Financial Corporation Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR), Feb 19, 2026 (sec.gov)
5. Capital One Completes Acquisition of Discover — Capital One, May 18, 2025 (capitalone.com)
6. Capital One Tests Moving Credit Cards to Discover Network — PYMNTS, Jul 22, 2026 (pymnts.com)
7. Regulation II: Average Debit Card Interchange Fee by Payment Card Network (2024 data; page retrieved 2026-10-16) — Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Oct 16, 2026 (federalreserve.gov)
8. Visa Prevents Approximately $25 Billion in Fraud Using Artificial Intelligence — Visa, Jun 17, 2019 (usa.visa.com)
9. Visa's Growing Services Business Infused with New AI-Powered Products — Visa, Mar 27, 2024 (usa.visa.com)
10. The Future is Here: Visa Announces New Era of Commerce Featuring AI — Visa, Apr 30, 2025 (usa.visa.com)
11. Visa Launches Enhanced A2A Protect Innovations to Help Financial Institutions Stop Fraud Before Money Leaves Accounts — Visa, Sep 1, 2026 (usa.visa.com)
12. Mastercard Enhances Artificial Intelligence Capability with the Acquisition of Brighterion, Inc. — Mastercard Investor Relations, Jul 17, 2017 (investor.mastercard.com)
13. Mastercard supercharges consumer protection with gen AI — Mastercard, Feb 1, 2024 (mastercard.com)
14. Mastercard unveils Agent Pay, pioneering agentic payments technology to power commerce in the age of AI — Mastercard, Apr 29, 2025 (mastercard.com)
15. Santander and Mastercard complete Europe's first live end-to-end payment executed by an AI agent — Mastercard, Mar 2, 2026 (mastercard.com)
16. Mastercard advances agentic commerce with new trust and intelligence services — Mastercard, Sep 30, 2026 (mastercard.com)
17. Mastercard and BMO expand Global Money Transfer service to nearly 70 destinations — Mastercard, Jul 30, 2025 (mastercard.com)
18. Mashreq Collaborates with Mastercard to Expand Quick Remit Cross-Border Payment Corridors — Mastercard, Jun 29, 2026 (mastercard.com)
19. Visa and BPI partner to launch Visa Direct, enabling outbound international transfers for Filipino businesses — Visa, Apr 29, 2026 (ph.review.visa.com)
20. Emirates NBD becomes the first bank in the UAE to launch Visa+ Simplifying International Money Transfers — Visa, Apr 14, 2025 (visa.com)
21. American Express Debuts Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit and Announces Industry-First Protection for Registered Agent Purchases — American Express via FT Markets, Apr 14, 2026 (markets.ft.com)
22. American Express Publishes Intent Intelligence Framework for Trusted Agentic Commerce — American Express via FT Markets, Oct 13, 2026 (markets.ft.com)
23. For the 19th Year in a Row, American Express Has the Lowest U.S. Credit Card Fraud Rate Among Major Card Networks — American Express, Jul 21, 2026 (americanexpress.com)
24. Amex's low fraud rate turns on its closed system — Payments Dive, Aug 25, 2026 (paymentsdive.com)
25. Send & Split (undated product page, retrieved 2026-10-16) — American Express, Oct 16, 2026 (americanexpress.com)
26. American Express Token Service (undated page, retrieved 2026-10-05) — American Express Global Network, Oct 5, 2026 (network.americanexpress.com)
27. About Discover Network: network alliances (undated page, retrieved 2026-10-16) — Discover Global Network, Oct 16, 2026 (discoverglobalnetwork.com)
28. Visa Partner Types: BIN sponsors, issuer processors, program managers (undated page, retrieved 2026-10-16) — Visa, Oct 16, 2026 (partner.visa.com)
29. Enhancing fintech programs, empowering innovation (Engage and Fintech Express) — Mastercard, Apr 25, 2024 (mastercard.com)
30. Agencies remind banks of potential risks associated with third-party deposit arrangements and request additional information on bank-fintech arrangements — Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, FDIC, OCC, Jul 25, 2024 (federalreserve.gov)