Visa Inc.
Incorporated in the state of California in the United States, Visa Inc. is a worldwide financial services firm based in Foster City. International electronic payments transfers are made possible using Visa-branded credit cards, debit cards, and prepaid debit cards, which are the most often used methods. Visa is one of the most valuable corporations in the world.
As a payment product provider, Visa does not issue cards or extend credit to clients, nor does it set rates and fees. Instead, Visa offers financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they may then use to provide their customers credit, debit, prepaid, and cash access programmes. According to the Nilson Report, a journal that follows the credit card industry, Visa's worldwide network (known as VisaNet) completed 100 billion transactions in 2014, with a total transaction volume of US$6.8 trillion, according to data published in 2015.
The BankAmericard credit card programme, introduced by Bank of America (BofA) in September 1958, was the first of its kind. In 1966, Bank of America started licencing the BankAmericard programme to other financial institutions in response to the entry of rival Master Charge (now Mastercard). By 1970, Bank of America had relinquished direct control of the BankAmericard programme, creating a consortium with the other different BankAmericard issuing institutions to assume responsibility for the program's administration. In 1976, the company was renamed Visa.
The VisaNet data centre in Ashburn, Virginia, processes almost all Visa transactions globally. The data centre is one of four secure data centres run by Visa that are situated in Ashburn, Virginia, Highlands Ranch, Colorado, London, England, and Singapore. These facilities are heavily protected against natural disasters, criminal activity, and terrorism; they can operate independently of one another and from external utilities if necessary; and they can handle up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations every second, depending on the workload.
Based on the yearly amount of card payments processed and the number of issued cards, Visa is the world's second-largest card payment company (debit and credit cards combined), having been eclipsed by China UnionPay in 2015. As a result, despite the fact that UnionPay's market share is mostly dependent on the size of its native market in China, Visa is still regarded the major financial card firm in the rest of the globe, where it commands a 50% market share of all card payments.