Visa

Visa, in payments, is Visa Inc., a company headquartered in San Francisco that runs a global network for card and digital payments. Banks and other financial institutions issue Visa-branded credit, debit and prepaid cards, merchants accept them through acquirers, and Visa's systems carry the messages and calculate the settlement between the parties. The word is unrelated to the travel document of the same name.

Visa does not issue cards, lend money to cardholders or sign up merchants. Those functions belong to its client institutions. It is the best-known example of an open-loop card scheme and, with Mastercard, one of the two networks with near-universal acceptance worldwide. Its shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Visa traces its origin to BankAmericard, a credit card program launched by Bank of America in Fresno, California, in 1958. From 1966 the bank licensed the program to other banks in the United States and abroad. In 1970 control passed to a membership organization owned by the issuing banks, National BankAmericard Inc., led by Dee Hock, with a parallel body for international licensees. The various national card brands were united under the single name Visa in 1976.

For three decades Visa operated as a group of regional associations owned by member banks. In 2007 most of these were merged into Visa Inc., which listed its shares in March 2008 in what was then the largest initial public offering in United States history. Visa Europe remained a separate bank-owned association until Visa Inc. bought it in 2016.

Visa follows the four-party card model. When a cardholder pays, the merchant's acquiring bank sends an authorization request through VisaNet, the company's processing network, to the cardholder's issuing bank, which approves or declines it. Later the transaction is cleared, and Visa calculates the net amount each institution owes or is owed and arranges settlement through designated banks.

Visa sets the framework within which its clients operate. Its card network rules cover who may participate, how cards are accepted, security requirements, dispute procedures and liability. It also sets default rates for the interchange fee, which the acquirer pays to the issuer on each transaction. Visa does not receive interchange.

The company earns fees from its client institutions, not interest from cardholders. Its main revenue lines are service fees based on the payment volume on Visa-branded cards, data processing fees for authorization, clearing and settlement, and international transaction fees for cross-border payments and currency conversion. These charges form part of the scheme fees that acquirers pass on to merchants. Part of gross revenue is returned to large issuers, merchants and partners as incentives under long-term agreements.

• Card products. Consumer and commercial credit card, debit and prepaid programs issued by clients under the Visa brand, with regional debit brands.
• Money movement. Visa Direct pushes funds to cards, bank accounts and wallets for payouts, person-to-person transfers and remittances.
• Tokenization. The Visa Token Service replaces card numbers with tokens for mobile wallets and stored credentials, a form of network tokenization.
• Risk and authentication. Fraud scoring supplied to issuers during authorization, and support for 3-D Secure authentication.
• Merchant and acquirer services. Gateway, fraud management and data services, including the Cybersource platform acquired in 2010.
• Newer areas. Open banking services through the acquisition of Tink in 2022, business-to-business payment products, settlement in stablecoins with selected partners and tools for purchases made by artificial intelligence agents under Visa Intelligent Commerce.

Visa is a founding member of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council and an owner of EMVCo, which manages the chip, contactless and tokenization specifications used across the card industry.

Visa is not a bank and is not supervised as one, but its fees and rules have been a frequent subject of regulation and litigation. In the United States, the Durbin Amendment and Regulation II cap debit interchange for large issuers and require that merchants have a choice of unaffiliated networks for routing debit transactions. The European Union capped consumer card interchange in 2015, and many other countries regulate interchange or network rules.

Merchants have pursued antitrust claims over interchange and acceptance rules for many years, most prominently in long-running class litigation in the United States against Visa, Mastercard and large banks. In 2020 the Department of Justice sued to block Visa's proposed acquisition of the data aggregator Plaid, and the deal was abandoned in early 2021. In September 2024 the department filed a separate case alleging that Visa had unlawfully maintained a monopoly in debit network services, which Visa disputes. In several countries, authorities have also promoted domestic schemes and instant payment systems as alternatives to the international networks.

Visa's closest competitor is Mastercard, which has a similar structure. American Express and Discover operate mainly as closed networks that also issue cards, and UnionPay and JCB are strong in their home markets. Beyond cards, Visa competes with account-to-account payment systems, mobile wallets that settle outside card rails, and buy now, pay later providers.

• Visa
• Visa Investor Relations