Directory Inc.

About

Visa Inc. (/?vi?z?/ or /?vi?s?/) (also known as Visa, stylized as VISA) is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Foster City, California, United States.[3] It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, gift cards, and debit cards.[4] Visa does not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers; rather, Visa provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they then use to offer credit, debit, prepaid and cash-access programs to their customers. In 2015, the Nilson Report, a publication that tracks the credit card industry, found that Visa’s global network (known as VisaNet) processed 100 billion transactions during 2014 with a total volume of US$6.8 trillion.[5] Visa has operations across all six continents. Nearly all Visa transactions worldwide are processed through the company’s directly-operated VisaNet at one of four secure data centers, located in Ashburn, Virginia; Highlands Ranch, Colorado; London, England; and Singapore.[6] These facilities are heavily secured against natural disasters, crime, and terrorism; can operate independently of each other and from external utilities if necessary; and can handle up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations every second.[7][5][8] Visa is the world’s second-largest card payment organization (debit and credit cards combined), after being surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015, based on annual value of card payments transacted and number of issued cards.