Visa Layoffs: 2,600 Tech Jobs Cut Hours Before a Record $11.6 Billion Quarter

Visa is cutting about 2,600 jobs, and most of them belong to the people who build its technology. CEO Ryan McInerney told employees in a memo on Tuesday, first reported by Bloomberg, that the payments company needs to run leaner and that AI is "accelerating the evolution" of how work gets done there.

A few hours after the memo leaked, Visa reported the best quarter in its history.

The cuts amount to roughly 7% of Visa's workforce, which stood at about 34,100 people at the end of its last fiscal year. They fall mainly on technology and product teams, the engineers and product managers who run VisaNet, the network that processed 71.7 billion transactions last quarter. CNBC confirmed the memo's contents with a person who has direct knowledge of it.

In the memo, McInerney framed the decision as conviction rather than cost-cutting:

"I have deep conviction that we are doing what is right for Visa, our clients and our partners as we continue to focus on driving efficiency across the company in order to reinvest in our highest potential opportunities."

Ryan McInerney, CEO of Visa, in the staff memo

Is AI actually the reason?

Not according to the people closest to the decision.

The memo does say AI is helping to "accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa". But Bloomberg's source, a person familiar with the company's reasoning, said automation was not the sole or even the primary factor. The primary factor is where Visa wants to spend: the savings go into consumer payments, commercial and money-movement products, and value-added services. That last category covers stablecoins (digital tokens pegged to a currency like the dollar), cross-border payments and business-to-business tools.

There's a second tell, and it's in the paperwork. The same evening, Visa filed its quarterly results with the SEC, the US stock market regulator. That filing books the cost of the layoffs and explains the reason for them in Visa's own official language. The word AI does not appear in that explanation. It attributes the severance to "actions taken to drive operational efficiencies and reinvest in high-growth opportunities".

The memo to employees says AI. The filing to investors says reallocation. Our read: the filing is the more honest version, because a company faces far more legal exposure for what it tells investors than for what it tells its staff.

What does the SEC filing show?

We read the Q3 earnings release Visa filed with the SEC, and the numbers around the layoffs are striking.

Visa booked a $563 million severance charge in the quarter. Spread across 2,600 people, that works out to roughly $216,000 per eliminated role, our calculation, assuming the charge covers this round in full. The charge is large enough that Visa's personnel expense jumped 41% year over year. Strip the severance out and the underlying growth was about 8%.

Everything else in the filing describes a company that has never done better. Revenue hit $11.6 billion, up 14%. Profit was $5.6 billion. Visa spent $4.9 billion buying back its own shares and paid out $6.2 billion to shareholders in total that quarter. McInerney's own statement in the release makes the contrast sharper:

"As the leading hyperscaler of payments globally, we are designing, building and shipping products at an increased velocity, positioning Visa, our clients and the ecosystem to capture the opportunities ahead and drive growth."

Ryan McInerney, CEO of Visa, in the earnings release

Read together, the two messages from the same day say Visa plans to ship products faster with 2,600 fewer of the people who build them.

Is the rest of the payments industry doing this too?

Yes, and Visa is arguably late to it.

Mastercard announced a 4% cut of its own workforce in January, also after a "strategic review", also while reporting profit growth. In February, Block cut around 4,000 people, close to 40% of its workforce, and Jack Dorsey named AI directly as the reason. Visa itself trimmed about 1,400 roles and contractors back in 2023, a round the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

The AI framing works differently at each company. Dorsey put it in a letter to shareholders, where the legal stakes are highest. Visa put it in a memo to employees and left it out of the investor documents. That difference is worth noticing.

The longer arc matters more than any single round. Visa employed about 11,300 people in 2015, per its own annual filing that year. A decade of expansion tripled that to 34,100. This is the first serious reversal of that build-out, and Visa hasn't said which offices absorb it. The San Francisco Chronicle noted the company won't say how many Bay Area workers are affected.

What does this mean if you work in tech?

The uncomfortable part of this story is which jobs got cut. These aren't support roles at a struggling company. They're core engineering roles at a company growing revenue 14% a year, and the company's official explanation is that it would rather spend the money elsewhere.

That's the pattern worth internalizing if you're a student or an engineer planning a career: profitability no longer protects headcount, and "AI efficiency" has become the public label for decisions that are mostly about reallocation. The practical signal is in where Visa says the money goes. Stablecoins, cross-border rails and B2B payments are the teams getting funded while general platform engineering shrinks.

For now, the concrete facts: 2,600 roles, about 7% of the company, mostly technology and product. Severance is booked at $563 million. Visa hasn't published a timeline, a location breakdown or which teams are safe. The earnings call replay is up at investor.visa.com for 30 days if you want to hear how management answers analysts on it.