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I have a Visa Inc. interview next week—how should I prepare?

Payments
Asked by Question Bot01/Jul/20161 answer

1 Answer

F

Faisal Khan

Answered 01/Jul/2016

Couple of things you can do:

  • Read the VISA 10k filing with the SEC (See: SEC Filings Details)
  • Search through Twitter #hashtag for #VISA (most would be immigration visa related tweets, but you can find a lot of gold otherwise).
  • Skim through like 1-2 months of VISA's official Twitter accounts (they have quite a few)
  • For the geographic region you're in, learn all about VISA's products & services.
  • Pay special attention to VISA press release section
  • You most likely cannot polish up on the technical know-how in a week, but you can be well prepared for everything VISA.
  • Use Google News to search for VISA related news
  • Learn about the top management, if an interviewer were to ask who is the CEO of VISA, you should be able to answer (as useless of a question that may be).
  • Take notes with you. A cheat sheet if you will. Surprise! Surprise! No one has ever told me not to consult with my notes. Note takers are respected in a lot of circles. There is no rule or law that says you cannot bring notes to a corporate company's interview, unless it is a testing service.
  • Did I mention take well written notes with you?
  • Prepare some solid 4-5 questions that you can ask the interviewer regarding VISA. You'll have to sift through a lot of data, but for example here is a question you might ask (depending on the mood), "What's VISA's parallel plan to compete with the all digital services that American Express would be rolling out for payments and its cards?" (add to this: "I was researching this but could not find concrete information")
  • Learn about the history of VISA and how it came into being.
  • Look through the Jobs / Career section to get a sense of semblance as to what else they are hiring at, titles, descriptions, locations, responsibilities.
  • Under no circumstances indicate your preference towards a flat-fee payments ecosystem.
  • Question: How many cards did VISA mail to its customers in 2014? Trick question: Zero. VISA does not mail any cards to its customers. The issuing banks do.
  • For each product of VISA, try finding a competing product of MasterCard, American Express, Discover, CUP, etc.
  • Get some latest statistics from various sources on card related payments. Take them along with your notes.
  • Don't forget to take your notes, you can take as many pages as you like. 10-20, 30. Just make sure you tab them so you know exactly where each information lies.
  • Question: How can you improve the VISA card? Unless you're the top 0.1% in cards & payments, don't even attempt to answer this question. You have scanty knowledge and not enough experience &/or background information to answer this conclusively. Tell them, you're not qualified (yet!) to answer this. But if they insist you take a shot at it, then prepare an answer, and put it in your notes.
  • Please keep your notes in a tidy and decent looking document carrier.
  • Wear a suit. Period.

Best of luck.
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