Visa

Visa is an American multinational financial services corporation operating electronic payment systems throughout the world and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. Visa also provides electronic payment, risk management, and payment security solutions for merchants, goods transaction services, digital media, social networks, mobile financial services, and financial institutions in developing economies. In 2021, Visa processed over $10 trillion in purchase transaction, making it the largest payment processor in the world in that fiscal period. Visa operates in over 200 countries and processes transactions in over 160 currencies, while capable of processing over 65,000 transactions per second.

Visa does not issue cards, extend credit, or set rates and fees for consumers. Instead, Visa provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products the financial institution uses to offer credit, debit, prepaid, and cash access programs to their customers.

Visa was launched in 1958 as BankAmericard by Bank of America in response to competitor Master Charge, now known as Mastercard. Bank of America began licensing the BankAmericard program to other financial institutions in 1966. By 1970, Bank of America gave up control of BankAmericard and formed a consortium of other BankAmericard issuer banks to take over management of the program, which would be renamed Visa in 1976.

In response to the emerging cryptocurrency markets, Visa introduced new solutions to offer to issuers, such as Coinbase or Crypto.com, to allow them to offer payment cards that can use cryptocurrency through the Visa payment processing system.

The solutions offered by Visa include credential issuance, allowing cryptocurrency holders to pay with Visa at merchants. The company offers a crypto API to provide new features to account holders, such as trading and rewards. Visa offers Crypto Partner Wallets for stablecoin payouts to enable USDC payouts so sellers and contributors have more ways to get paid and pay. As well, Visa offers different thought leadership programs to help users understand cryptocurrency and possible applications.

In the first quarter of 2022, Visa reported that customers using their cryptocurrency-linked cards had made $2.5 billion in payments, which represented 70 percent of the company's cryptocurrency volume for all of fiscal 2021. In turn, Visa announced a network of cryptocurrency wallet partners increasing from 54 to 65, including Coinbase, Circle, and BlockFi, while the number of merchants accepting cryptocurrency as payment grew to almost 100 million.