Credit card giant Visa is deepening its relationship with the creator economy.
At Web Summit in Lisbon on Tuesday, Visa is set to announce a program with Karat Financial, a fintech startup that provides credit cards and banking tailored to content creators. The program is scheduled to launch in 2026 for Karat’s clients and will initially be free, with the possibility of becoming a paid service in the future.
The program will offer tools to help with tasks including setting up automated prompts to vendors about unpaid invoices and enrolling their bills in autopay. It will also feature an AI agent that can assist in evaluating brand deal offers.
Any tools that ease the work of chasing payments can be beneficial to creators, said Kyle Hjelmeseth, CEO of G&B Digital Management, a creator-management company. Brands that say they’ll pay in 30 days often take up to 60 and even 120 days, causing some creators to run into trouble paying rent and hampering their ability to plan and take risks.
“When I started doing this 10 years ago, I was sending invoices on behalf of creators and follow-ups,” Hjelmeseth said. “Are brands paying more on time than they were 10 years ago? Absolutely not. It’s a huge issue for a normal creator.”
Visa says it geared the tools toward people who are trying to be full-time creators and are making money, but not yet famous. Visa will measure the program’s success by how much creators use the tools and how well it helps them manage their cash flow.
The move comes as the creator economy continues to expand and grab attention and revenue from traditional media. Ad giant WPP forecast that creators would earn $185 billion in 2025, up 20% from 2024.
“We are firm believers that the composition of the pie is changing, meaning creators are a new segment that has emerged over the last few years,” said Jonathan Kolozsvary, global head of small business at Visa.
Other financial companies have also been catering to creators. In February, Mastercard announced its Business Builder debit and credit card products, which are pitched to creators. That program offers tools to reduce creators’ personal liability for their online content, lower their tax burden, and simplify their business management, among other things.
New research reveals creators’ business needs
Visa enlisted TikTok’s top star, Khaby Lame, to help promote its creator initiatives. The new program builds on Visa’s 2024 move to classify creators as small businesses, which enabled them to take advantage of certain financial tools.
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Visa is launching the program in tandem with a new research report titled “Monetized,” which shows that creators are growing more optimistic about their earning potential and are increasingly viewing it as a career path, with 88% expecting their revenue to increase over the next year.
Conducted in partnership with TikTok and Morning Consult, the report surveyed over 1,000 creators from May to August across the United States, Brazil, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates.
Nearly half of the content creators in the report said they were self-taught in most business areas. The top areas they said they wanted help in — all cited by about a fourth of respondents — were contract negotiation, business strategy, financial management, and tax/legal compliance.
Kolozsvary said that creator pain points are similar to those of small businesses in general, including managing cash flow and accessing capital.
He said that one difference for creators is that when they “turn that passion to profit, they don’t know what tax implications look like now that they’re a business, and not just a consumer.”
