Click to watchVisa Direct has a new Global Head. Vira Platonova takes the role after serving as Chief Revenue Officer. She now leads one of Visa’s most critical products at a time when digital money movement is expanding fast.
The business processed 3.3 billion transactions in Q3 2025. That’s more than a billion transactions each month. At this pace, Visa Direct is set to clear 12 billion transactions in FY 2025. The product connects card and non-card rails across person-to-person, business, and government payments.
Visa is chasing an $80 trillion market in domestic and cross-border flows. Appointing Platonova signals the company’s intent to sharpen its B2B2X push. Her track record includes ten years at Visa, seven of them continuous. Since February 2024, she has led sales and solutioning teams as CRO.
“Investors and policymakers respond not just to stories, but to numbers,” she told FXC Intelligence CEO Daniel Webber, in her first interview after the appointment.
Visa Direct is a core part of Visa’s money movement strategy. By placing a long-time insider with regional and global experience at the helm, Visa is strengthening its position against fast-growing rivals in the cross-border space. The leadership move also shows the product is being treated as a standalone growth engine within Visa’s broader payments network.
Click to viewPlatonova first joined Visa in 2007, returned in 2018 as Senior Vice President and Group Country Manager for CISSEE, and oversaw 17 markets from Kyiv. She helped drive digital payments during a time of geopolitical upheaval in Eastern Europe. Before Visa, she spent eight years at Mastercard.
Her career milestones include being named “Female Business Leader of the Year” at the Future of Emerging Europe Awards in 2021 for her work supporting women entrepreneurs and growing Visa’s CISSEE operations.
Platonova replaces Ruben Salazar Genovez, who left Visa to become President of TerraPay. She inherits Visa Direct at a time of rapid growth, with volumes surging into the billions each quarter.
Her next test will be to balance global expansion with local adaptation. Visa Direct’s footprint now stretches across consumer, business, and government payments. As flows shift from traditional banking to digital networks, her leadership will help define how Visa captures the next wave of growth in payments.
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