A Good Quarter, By the Numbers
Visa closed out its fiscal third quarter with net revenue of $11.6 billion, up 14 percent year over year, and net income of $5.6 billion, up 7 percent. Even now, in an economy where every earnings call includes a mandatory nod to artificial intelligence, Visa's numbers were healthy enough that nobody needed to invent a reason to feel good about them.
They invented one anyway. On the same day it reported those results, Visa announced it was cutting 2,600 jobs — about 7 percent of its workforce, concentrated in technology and product teams — and framed the decision as a downstream effect of The Algorithm finally showing up for work.
The stock did not object. The 2,600 people who no longer have jobs there presumably had thoughts.
The Efficiency Story
CEO Ryan McInerney told employees that AI is "helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa," language precise enough to mean almost anything and vague enough to mean nothing in particular. Sources familiar with the decision confirm AI was "a significant factor, but not the sole driver" — which is corporate for: we are not going to litigate this specific point, please stop asking.
In a development that will surprise no one who has been paying attention, the same earnings release that announced the layoffs also announced $6.2 billion returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. The company found room in the budget for one of those two line items considerably more comfortably than the other.
The Severance Bill
Here is the part sources within the Finance Community would prefer got less attention: personnel expenses at Visa jumped 40 percent for the quarter, to $2.5 billion, largely on the strength of $563 million in severance costs tied to the very layoffs The Algorithm gets credit for. Visa is, in other words, spending nine figures to pay people not to work there anymore, in the name of a technology whose central promise is that people won't need to be paid to work there at all.
The math has the candor of a magician explaining, mid-trick, that the rabbit was in the hat the whole time.
A Pattern, Not an Incident
Visa is not alone. Mastercard cut 4 percent of its workforce earlier this year. Block eliminated roughly 4,000 positions in February. The payments industry appears to have collectively decided that the correct response to AI's arrival is to fire people first and figure out the org chart later — an approach that, elsewhere in the economy, has already produced a small cottage industry of companies quietly rehiring the engineers they let go once the AI turned out not to do the job on its own.
Visa says it's reinvesting the savings into cross-border payments, commercial payments, and stablecoin infrastructure — growth areas, one presumes, that will eventually need staffing too.
The Algorithm was unavailable for comment. The severance checks, notably, were not.
Sources: HR Executive — Visa Cuts 2,600 Jobs as AI Reshapes How Work Gets Done · IndexBox — Visa Layoffs 2026
