Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) operates as a payments technology company worldwide. The company facilitates digital payments among consumers, merchants, financial institutions, businesses, strategic partners, and government entities. It operates VisaNet, a transaction processing network that enables authorization, clearing, and settlement of payment transactions. In addition, the company offers card products, platforms, and value-added services. It provides its services under the Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink, VPAY, and PLUS brands. Visa Inc. was founded in 1958 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Visa is a global payments company and is one of the four major US credit card networks (along with Mastercard, American Express and Discover). Visa is accepted at over 80 million merchant locations in 200 countries, interacts with 15 thousand financial institutions and processed 165 billion transactions with $13 trillion of payments and cash volume in the 12-month period ending September 2021. Visa has some 3.6 billion branded cards in use.
This created an opportunity to purchase a very high-quality business that benefits from substantial barriers to entry, network effects and several structural growth drivers, including consumer spending growth, the shift from cash to card, increasing ecommerce penetration, market share growth and global expansion. Visa has a long runway for revenue growth as cash and checks continue to lose share. Consumers can’t use cash and checks online, after all. The company has a rock-solid balance sheet and has a high conversion of net income to free cash flow, which it uses for share repurchases, dividend growth and acquisitions. One of the ways Visa is protecting its top spot in credit card processing is acquiring and making deals with fintech partners. It is acquiring smaller fintechs to stay competitive in digital payments.
Therefore, Visa Inc is one of the best long-term fintech stock investment.