Visa Payments Forum

Visa Payments Forum (VPF) is Visa's flagship global payments and innovation conference, hosted annually in San Francisco. Visa publicly committed in August 2025 to host VPF at the Moscone Center in San Francisco through 2030, making the conference the city's largest recurring payments-industry event.

VPF brings together senior payments executives from Visa's global client community — issuing banks, acquiring banks, processors, technology vendors, merchants, and the regulators and policymakers shaping global money movement. The audience is overwhelmingly senior and overwhelmingly enterprise; many attendees treat VPF as their single highest-value annual scheme touchpoint. It sits alongside TRANSACT, Fintech and Insurtech Generations and CardForum as calendar anchors for the same audiences.

What happens at VPF

• Conference programme — keynote sessions from Visa leadership and global payments executives, panel discussions on scheme strategy and product direction, deep-dive working sessions on specific Visa product capabilities, and the year's most concentrated set of customer briefings on Visa's roadmap.
• Visa product showcases — Visa typically uses VPF to announce new product capabilities across issuing, acquiring, tokenisation (Visa Token Service), Visa Direct, Visa B2B Connect, fraud and risk decisioning, and emerging commerce experiences.
• Networking — Visa client receptions, partner-vendor meetings, and the curated 1:1 introductions Visa facilitates between issuing banks, acquirers, and key technology partners.
• The fringe schedule — partner dinners, regulator briefings, and the Bay-Area fintech-community gatherings that surround the conference.

Who attends

Heads of payments, treasury, and operations at global and regional banks. CIOs and CTOs from issuing banks, acquirers, and major processors (Fiserv, FIS, Global Payments, Worldline, Adyen, Stripe, Checkout.com). Card issuing and acquiring leadership. Fraud and risk decisioning executives. Senior representatives from US payments policy (US Treasury, Federal Reserve, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency). International central bank and payments-network representatives. Visa partner-merchant payments leaders. Fintech founders and investors focused on issuing, scheme, and infrastructure plays.

VPF is not a consumer-fintech event and is not a startup pitch event in the traditional sense. It is the annual scheme-strategy touchpoint for the people running global card issuing, acquiring, and payments infrastructure.

Dominant themes at VPF 2026

• Visa product roadmap — issuing, acquiring, tokenisation (Visa Token Service), real-time decisioning, fraud tooling.
• Visa Direct and account-to-account payments — push-payment use cases, cross-border, payouts, real-time rails.
• Visa B2B Connect — cross-border B2B payments, correspondent banking alternatives.
• Tokenisation and digital wallets — Click to Pay, Apple Pay / Google Pay integration, network tokens vs card-on-file.
• Fraud, risk, and authentication — 3-D Secure 2, behavioural biometrics, AI-assisted fraud detection.
• Real-time and instant payments — FedNow integration, scheme strategy for instant rails.
• Commerce experiences — AI-driven commerce, embedded payments, agentic commerce.
• Regulation and scheme economics — US interchange policy, scheme fee reviews, durbin amendment debates.

Planning to attend

The Moscone Center is in central San Francisco (SoMa); hotels in walking distance include the Marriott Marquis (adjacent), W San Francisco, Park Central, and The St. Regis. Many Visa-sponsored receptions take place at Moscone West and at the rooftop venues nearby - staying close to the convention center saves the most time. Most international delegates fly into SFO; OAK and SJC are realistic alternates with rideshare or BART access. Vendor calendars and client-meeting slots typically fill 3-4 weeks before the conference - request meetings 4-6 weeks ahead. VPF anchors a dense June calendar: Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam runs the week before and EBAday in Copenhagen the week after, while the autumn scheme-strategy counterpart is Sibos in Miami, followed by Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas.

Use the expense calculator below to estimate the total cost of attending — registration, flights, hotels, meals, and ground transport — based on your origin city.