Visa Inc. (Visa) operates as a global payments technology company. The company facilitates global commerce and money movement across more than 200 countries and territories. Visa operates one of the world’s largest electronic payments networks — VisaNet — which provides transaction processing services, primarily authorization, clearing and settlement. The company offers products, solutions and services that facilitate secure, reliable and efficient money movement for participants in the ecosyste...
Visa Inc. (Visa) operates as a global payments technology company. The company facilitates global commerce and money movement across more than 200 countries and territories. Visa operates one of the world’s largest electronic payments networks — VisaNet — which provides transaction processing services, primarily authorization, clearing and settlement. The company offers products, solutions and services that facilitate secure, reliable and efficient money movement for participants in the ecosystem.
The company focuses on extending, enhancing and investing in its proprietary advanced transaction processing network, VisaNet, to offer a single connection point for facilitating payment transactions to multiple endpoints through various form factors. As a network of networks enabling global movement of money through all available networks, the company is working to provide payment solutions and services for everyone, everywhere.
The company facilitates secure, reliable and efficient money movement among consumers, issuing and acquiring financial institutions and merchants. The company has traditionally referred to this structure as the four-party model. As the payments ecosystem continues to evolve, the company has broadened this model to include digital banks, digital wallets and a range of financial technology companies (fintechs), governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The company provides transaction processing services (primarily authorization, clearing and settlement) to its financial institution and merchant clients through VisaNet. During fiscal 2024, 303 billion payments and cash transactions with Visa’s brand were processed by Visa or other networks, equating to an average of 829 million transactions per day. Of the 303 billion total transactions, 234 billion were processed by Visa.
The company offers a wide range of Visa-branded payment products that its clients, including nearly 14,500 financial institutions, use to develop and offer payment solutions or services, including credit, debit, prepaid and cash access programs for individual, business and government account holders. During fiscal 2024, Visa had 4.6 billion payment credentials, which are issued Visa card accounts, that were available to be used at more than 150 million merchant locations worldwide.
The company takes an open partnership approach and seeks to provide value by enabling access to its global network, including offering its technology capabilities through application programming interfaces (APIs). The company partners with both traditional and emerging players to innovate and expand the payments ecosystem, allowing them to use the resources of its platform to scale and grow their businesses more quickly and effectively.
The company is accelerating the migration to digital payments through its network of networks strategy. The company aims to provide a single connection point so that Visa clients can enable money movement for businesses, governments and consumers, regardless of which network is used to start or complete the transaction. The company provides value-added services to its clients, including issuing solutions, acceptance solutions, risk and identity solutions, open banking solutions and advisory services.
The company invests in and promotes its brand to the benefit of its clients and partners through advertising, promotional and sponsorship initiatives with the International Olympic Committee, the International Paralympic Committee, the National Football League, and the Red Bull Formula One Teams—the Oracle Red Bull Racing Team and the Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team, among others. The company also uses these sponsorship assets to showcase its payment innovations.
Core Business
In a typical Visa C2B payment transaction, the consumer purchases goods or services from a merchant using a Visa card or payment product. The merchant presents the transaction data to an acquirer, usually a bank or third-party processing firm that supports acceptance of Visa cards or payment products, for verification and processing. Through VisaNet, the acquirer presents the transaction data to Visa, which in turn sends the transaction data to the issuer to check the account holder’s account balance or credit line for authorization. After the transaction is authorized, the issuer posts the transaction to the consumer’s account and effectively pays the acquirer an amount equal to the value of the transaction, minus the interchange reimbursement fee. The acquirer pays the amount of the purchase, minus the merchant discount rate (MDR), to the merchant.
Visa earns revenue by facilitating money movement across more than 200 countries and territories among a global set of consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities through innovative technologies.
Service Revenue
Earned for services provided in support of client usage of Visa payment services.
Other Revenue
Consist mainly of value-added services related to advisory, marketing and certain card benefits; license fees for use of the Visa brand or technology; and fees for account holder services, certification and licensing.
Data Processing Revenue
Earned for authorization, clearing and settlement; value-added services related to issuing, acceptance, and risk and identity solutions; network access; and other maintenance and support services that facilitate transaction and information processing among the company’s clients globally.
Client Incentives
Paid to financial institution clients, merchants and other business partners to grow payments volume; increase Visa product acceptance; encourage merchant acceptance and use of Visa payment services; and drive innovation.
International Transaction Revenue
Earned for cross-border transaction processing and currency conversion activities.
Visa provides payment processing for both non-Visa-branded and Visa-branded card transactions. In the context of non-Visa-branded card transactions, the company facilitates payment processing by providing gateway routing services to other payment networks. At the client’s request, the company may provide authorization, clearing or settlement services on its network before or after it routes the transaction to the other payments network. In those instances, Visa may earn data processing revenue for the specific services provided. In the context of Visa-branded card transactions on its network, the company provides authorization, clearing and settlement services and may earn service, data processing, international transaction or other revenue.
The company’s acquiring clients are responsible for setting the fees they charge to merchants for the MDR and for soliciting merchants. Visa sets fees to acquirers independently from any fees that acquirers may charge merchants. Therefore, the fees the company receives from issuers and acquirers are not derived from interchange reimbursement fees or MDRs.
Strategy
The company seeks to accelerate revenue growth in three primary areas — consumer payments, new flows and value- added services.
Consumer Payments
The company focuses on developing innovative digital solutions and products across face-to-face and ecommerce payments, providing consumers and merchants around the world the best ways to pay and be paid.
Core Products
Visa’s growth has been driven by the strength of its core products — credit, debit and prepaid.
Credit: Credit cards and digital credentials allow consumers and businesses to access credit to pay for goods and services. Credit cards are affiliated with programs operated by financial institution clients, co-brand partners, fintechs and affinity partners.
Debit: Debit cards and digital credentials allow consumers and small businesses to purchase goods and services using funds held in their deposit accounts. Debit cards enable account holders to transact in person, online or via mobile without needing cash or checks and without accessing a line of credit. The Visa/PLUS Global ATM network also provides debit, credit and prepaid account holders with cash access, and other banking capabilities, in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide through issuing and acquiring partnerships with both financial institutions and independent automated teller machine (ATM) operators.
Prepaid: Prepaid cards and digital credentials draw from a designated balance funded by individuals, businesses or governments. Prepaid cards address many use cases and needs, including general purpose reloadable, payroll, government and corporate disbursements, healthcare, gift and travel. Visa-branded prepaid cards also play an important part in financial inclusion, bringing payment solutions to those with limited or no access to traditional banking products.
Key Enablers
The company enables consumer payments and helps its clients grow as digital commerce, new technologies and new participants continue to transform the payments ecosystem. Some examples include:
Tap to Pay
Since the company introduced Tap to Pay technology over ten years ago, it has emerged as a preferred way to pay in the face-to-face environment among consumers in many countries around the world. Tap to Pay adoption is growing and many consumers have come to expect this seamless payment experience.
Tap to Pay has become the default way Visa cardholders pay in nearly 60 countries and territories, with more than 90 percent penetration of Visa face-to-face transactions, and in over 125 countries and territories, Tap to Pay comprises more than 50 percent of the company’s face-to-face transactions. Excluding the U.S., over 80 percent of face-to-face Visa transactions globally were contactless in fiscal 2024. In the U.S., Visa has surpassed 50 percent contactless penetration and more than 535 million Tap to Pay-enabled Visa cards have been issued. In addition, the company has activated more than 870 contactless public transport projects worldwide. The company processed more than 2.0 billion contactless transactions on global transit systems in fiscal 2024, surpassing the number of transactions in 2023.
Tokenization
Visa Token Service (VTS) brings trust to digital commerce innovation. As consumers increasingly rely on digital transactions, VTS is designed to enhance the digital ecosystem through improved authorization, reduced fraud and improved consumer experience. VTS helps protect digital transactions by replacing 16-digit Visa account numbers with a token that includes a surrogate account number, cryptographic information and other data to protect the underlying account information. This security technology can work for a variety of in person or online payment transactions. As of September 30, 2024, Visa had provisioned 11.5 billion network tokens.
Click to Pay
Click to Pay provides a simplified and more consistent cardholder checkout experience online by removing time-consuming key entry of personal information and enabling consumer and transaction data to be passed securely between payments network participants. Based on the EMV® Secure Remote Commerce industry standard, Click to Pay brings a standardized and streamlined approach to online checkout and meets the needs of consumers shopping across a growing number of connected devices. The goal of Click to Pay is to make online payments as secure, reliable and interoperable as the in-person checkout experience.
New Flows
The company’s new flows business is focused on driving digitization and improving the payments and money movement experience across all payment flows, beyond C2B, through its network of networks. These include P2P, B2C, B2B and G2C payments, which provide some of the largest payment opportunities in the world.
Visa Commercial Solutions
As a long-time participant in the B2B ecosystem, the company has been supporting small businesses, large and middle market companies, and governments with their payments needs. The company continues to see opportunity for growth as businesses seek simple digital experiences, similar to those available to consumers. Visa offers a holistic suite of tailored solutions for businesses – providing payment, reconciliation, and data to help manage working capital and drive efficiency, set spend controls, manage expenses, and automate payment processes.
The company’s portfolio of commercial payments solutions includes small business cards, corporate (travel) cards, purchasing cards, virtual cards and digital credentials. Businesses look to optimize processes and effectively manage working capital by utilizing its commercial payments solutions. To support small businesses, the company expanded the small business supplier matching webtool so that it is directly accessible to small and medium size businesses, enhancing their ability to use their cards for business payments. For large business spend, it has been expanding its presence in specific commercial spend verticals, such as fleet and fuel, travel and agriculture. The company has also extended its products and capabilities specifically for accounts receivable and accounts payable spend, through either embedded finance capabilities, or new solutions like its Accounts Receivable Manager virtual card automation solution in the U.S.
Visa Direct Platform
The company facilitates domestic and cross-border money movement, enabling clients to collect, convert, hold and send funds across its network, which has the potential to reach more than 11 billion cards, bank accounts and digital wallets. Visa Direct enables P2P payments and account-to-account (A2A) transfers, business and government payouts to individuals or small businesses, merchant settlements and refunds, among other use cases, across more than 195 countries and territories.
Visa Direct utilizes more than 75 domestic payment schemes, more than 15 real-time payments schemes, more than 15 card-based networks and more than five payment gateways, with the potential to reach more than 11.0 billion endpoints, through 4.0 billion cards, 3.5 billion bank accounts and 3.5 billion digital wallets. In fiscal 2024, Visa Direct processed nearly 10 billion transactions for more than 550 partners.
Visa B2B Connect is a key part of the company’s value proposition and considered part of the Visa Direct platform. It is a multilateral B2B cross-border payments network designed to facilitate reliable, secure and transactions from the bank of origin directly to the beneficiary bank, helping streamline settlement and optimize payments for financial institutions’ corporate clients. Visa B2B Connect continues to scale and is available in more than 100 countries and territories.
The Visa Direct platform also includes Visa Cross-Border Solutions and its digitally native Currencycloud capabilities that service new flows and the company’s established cross-border consumer payments businesses with capabilities such as providing real-time foreign exchange rates, virtual accounts, and enhanced liquidity and settlement.
In addition, the company’s Visa+ solution provides interoperability for its clients. In 2023, the company announced the launch of Visa+, which enables transfers between participating P2P apps. Visa+ is fully live for eligible users of PayPal and Venmo in the U.S. In addition to bringing reach, flexibility and convenience to P2P payment experiences, Visa+ can help merchants improve the process of disbursing funds to their users, also known as B2C payouts, which is live with DailyPay.
Value-Added Services
Value-added services represent an opportunity for the company to diversify its revenue with products and solutions that help its clients and partners optimize their performance, differentiate their offerings and create better experiences for their customers. The company’s comprehensive suite of value-added services spans five categories — Issuing Solutions, Acceptance Solutions, Risk and Identity Solutions, Open Banking Solutions and Advisory Services.
The company’s value-added services strategy has three areas of focus: provide services for Visa transactions; deliver network-agnostic services for non-Visa transactions; and provide services that go beyond payments. The company has made significant progress across each of these areas and offer more than 200 products and services as of September 30, 2024, many of which are designed to work together to deliver high impact business outcomes.
Issuing Solutions
Visa DPS is a large issuer processor of Visa debit transactions. In addition to multi-network transaction processing, Visa DPS also provides a wide range of value-added services, including fraud mitigation, dispute management, data analytics, campaign management, a suite of digital solutions and contact center services. The company’s capabilities in API-based issuer processing solutions, like DPS Forward, allow its clients to create new payments use cases and provides them with modular capabilities for digital payments.
In early 2024, Visa completed its acquisition of Pismo, a global, cloud-native issuer processing and core banking platform with operations in Latin America, Asia Pacific and Europe. Pismo’s technology platform expands Visa’s offerings to include core banking and card-issuer processing capabilities across credit, debit and prepaid cards via cloud native APIs and also helps enable Visa to provide support and connectivity for emerging payment frameworks and real-time payments (RTP) networks for financial institution clients.
The company provides a range of other services and digital solutions to issuers, such as account controls, digital issuance and branded consumer experiences. In addition, Visa offers loyalty and benefits solutions to issuers aimed at creating compelling and differentiated cardholder experiences, as well as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) capabilities, which allow shoppers the flexibility to pay for a purchase in equal payments over a defined period of time. Visa is investing in installments as a payments strategy — by offering Visa credentials and BNPL solutions to issuers and fintechs.
Acceptance Solutions
Visa Acceptance Solutions provide modular, value-added services in addition to the traditional gateway function of connecting merchants to payment processing. Using the Visa Acceptance Platform, acquirers, payment service providers, independent software vendors and merchants can improve the way their consumers engage and transact; help to mitigate fraud and lower operational costs; and adapt to changing business requirements. They can also connect with other fintechs through a global payment management platform to use their services. Using an omnichannel solution with a cloud-based architecture, Visa Acceptance Solutions capabilities, which includes Cybersource and Authorize.net, provide new and enhanced payment integrations with ecommerce platforms, enabling sellers and acquirers to provide tailored commerce experiences with payments seamlessly embedded.
In addition, Visa Acceptance Solutions provide secure, reliable services for merchants and acquirers that reduce friction and drive acceptance. Examples include Token Management Service, which helps simplify network token adoption, access and management for merchant and acquiring clients, provides a single integration point into major card networks and is used standalone or easily integrated into other payment solutions (please see the Tokenization discussion above); Global Urban Mobility, which supports transit operators to accept Visa contactless payments in addition to closed-loop payment solutions; and Account Updater, which provides updated account information for merchants to help strengthen customer relationships and retention. Visa also offers Dispute Management Services, including a network-agnostic solution from Verifi that enables merchants to prevent and resolve disputes with a single connection.
Risk and Identity Solutions
Visa’s Risk and Identity Solutions transform data into insights for near real-time decisions and facilitate account holder authentication to help financial institution and merchant clients prevent fraud and protect account holder data. With the increasing popularity of omnichannel commerce and digital payments among consumers, fraud prevention helps increase trust in digital payments. The Visa Protect suite of solutions include a range of products that empower financial institutions and merchants with tools that facilitate automation, simplify fraud prevention and enhance payment security, such as Visa Consumer Authentication Service, Visa Protect Authentication Intelligence, and Visa Provisioning Intelligence. These offerings highlight the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, for example, Visa Protect Authentication Intelligence uses machine learning algorithms to identify fraud for Visa Secure authentication requests and Visa Provisioning Intelligence is an AI-based product designed to prevent tokens from being fraudulently provisioned.
In March 2024, Visa announced three new products as part of the end-to-end Visa Protect suite that are designed to reduce fraud across immediate A2A and card not present (CNP) payments, as well as transactions both on and off Visa’s network. Visa Deep Authorization is an AI-powered transaction risk scoring solution tailored to better manage CNP payments, which strengthens the protection of Visa’s transactions through transaction risk scoring. Visa Protect for A2A Payments is the company’s first fraud prevention solution built specifically for real-time non-card payments. Finally, Visa Risk Manager with scheme agnostic Visa Advanced Authorization is a comprehensive AI-powered fraud risk management solution. Visa’s value-added fraud prevention tools layer on top of a suite of its network programs that protect the safety and integrity of the payment ecosystem, help to prevent, detect and mitigate threats.
Open Banking Solutions
Since its acquisition of Tink AB, an open banking platform, the company continues to accelerate the development and adoption of open banking securely and at scale. Visa’s open banking capabilities range from data access use cases, such as account verification, balance check and personal finance management, to payment initiation capabilities, such as A2A transactions and merchant payments. These capabilities can help its partner businesses deliver valuable services to their customers.
In fiscal 2024, the company expanded its presence in Europe and began expanding into the U.S. with a suite of product offerings that enable users to connect accounts and provide trusted parties with access to their financial data, including digitizing and streamlining the A2A payments experience. In fiscal 2025, the company plans to launch Visa A2A in the U.K., an open system bringing standards, rules and a dispute management service to eligible banks and businesses, enabling them to provide consumers with a more streamlined bill payment experience. Key features will include increased protection, more optionality by allowing consumers to pay directly from their bank accounts and enhanced controls over payment permissions.
Advisory Services
Visa Advisory Services offers deep payments expertise through a global consulting practice, proprietary analytics models, data scientists and economists, marketing services and managed services to deliver insights for issuers, acquirers, merchants, fintechs and other partners that help them make better business decisions and scale their operations.
Operating as the payments consulting arm of Visa, Visa Consulting and Analytics (VCA) utilizes the company’s payments expertise and economic intelligence to identify actionable insights, make recommendations and helps implement solutions. VCA consists of specialized advisory practices such as: strategy and commercial money movement, portfolio optimization, digital, AI, risk and implementation support, which drive measurable outcomes for its clients. VCA Managed Services embeds teams within client organizations to help execute key initiatives.
Visa Marketing Services provides clients with unique activation opportunities with Visa’s sponsorships and utilizes the company’s data analytics and understanding of customers’ transactional behavior to provide marketing solutions designed to deliver effective results, drive brand preference and influence consumer behavior.
Competition
The company competes with alternative solutions to its new flows (e.g., Visa Direct and Visa B2B Connect) such as ACH, RTP and wires.
Government Regulation
The company is subject to anti-corruption laws and regulations, including the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the UK Bribery Act and other laws that generally prohibit the making or offering of improper payments to foreign government officials and political figures for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business or to gain an unfair business advantage. The company is also subject to anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing laws and regulations, including the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act. In addition, the company is subject to economic and trade sanctions programs administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the U.S.
Visa is subject to financial sector oversight and regulation in substantially all of the jurisdictions in which the company operates. In the U.S., for example, the Federal Banking Agencies (FBA) has supervisory oversight over Visa under applicable federal banking laws and policies as a technology service provider to U.S. financial institutions. The federal banking agencies comprising the FBA are the Federal Reserve Board, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the National Credit Union Administration. Visa may also be separately examined by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as a service provider to the banks that issue Visa-branded consumer credit and debit card products. Central banks in other countries/regions, including Canada, Europe, India, Ukraine and the U.K., have recognized or designated Visa as a retail payment system under various types of financial stability regulations. Visa is also subject to oversight by banking and financial sector authorities in other jurisdictions, such as Brazil and Hong Kong.
Visa in Europe continues to be subject to complex and evolving regulation in the EEA and the U.K. Other regulations in Europe, such as the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), require, among other things, that the company’s financial institution clients provide certain customer account access rights to emerging non-financial institution players. PSD2 also includes strong customer authentication requirements for certain transactions that could impose both operational complexity on Visa and impact consumer payment experiences. Visa Europe is also subject to supervisory oversight by the European Central Bank and certain competent authorities in Europe.
In the U.K., Visa Europe is designated as a Recognized Payment System, bringing it within the scope of the Bank of England’s supervisory powers and subjecting it to various requirements, including on issues such as governance and risk management designed to maintain the stability of the UK’s financial system. Visa Europe is also regulated by the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR), which has wide-ranging powers and authority to review the company’s business practices, systems, rules and fees with respect to promoting competition and innovation in the U.K., and ensuring payment systems take care of, and promote, the interests of service-users. The PSR recently established a supervisory team to specifically oversee payment system operators like Visa in the aforementioned areas. Post-Brexit, the UK has adopted various European regulations, including regulations that impact the payments ecosystem, such as the IFR and PSD2. The PSR is responsible for monitoring Visa Europe’s compliance with the IFR as adopted in the U.K.
History
Visa Inc. was founded in 1958. The company was incorporated in 2007.
