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Visa Inc.’s top executives made it plain Thursday afternoon that the story of the company’s growth into the near future is threefold, including cryptocurrency, cross-border transactions, and the buy now, pay later trend. “Visa is enabling scale for BNPL, crypto, and wallets,” Visa chief executive Alfred Kelly told equity analysts during a call to discuss his company’s performance for its fiscal 2022 first quarter, which ended Dec. 31.
Visa’s cross-border activity, hammered by the pandemic, is bouncing back, company officials said. Indeed, total cross-border volume returned to 2019 levels in August and have exceeded those levels since, according to numbers the company showed as part of its earnings presentation. While Visa’s payments dollar volume in the quarter increased 20%, its cross-border volume increase was 40%. “While Omicron has had some impact, it has been modest,” chief financial officer Vasant Prabhu said. “Borders are being re-opened and restrictions lifted.”
In December, Visa closed on its nearly $1-billion acquisition of London-based Currency Cloud Ltd. , a deal that is expected to further the company’s growth in cross-border payments and bolster its account-to-account business. Known as CurrencyCloud, the company specializes in foreign-exchange technology for international payments, a field even many small businesses are engaged in.
But Kelly also expressed optimism for Visa’s ventures in cryptocurrency and in buy now, pay later transactions. More than 65 crypto platforms can now issue Visa credentials, he said, while Visa recently previewed a set of application programming interfaces aimed at supporting banks looking to handle central bank digital currencies.
With the hot installment-payment trend, Kelly said, “Visa is enabling scale for BNPL. We’re seeing more and more BNPL providers issue Visa credentials.” Affirm Inc., a major BNPL provider, has chosen to brand a new card as the Affirm Visa Plus Card, Kelly added.
On the acquiring side of the business, Kelly indicated “it’s early days” for Visa Acceptance Cloud, introduced two weeks ago. The service lets acquirers, payment service providers, point-of-sale system makers, and Internet of Things developers move the payment processing software from the hardware device to the computing cloud. Tests of the new platform are happening in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia.
For now, at any rate, “our approach is to not charge for it,” Kelly told the analysts. “Our goal is to drive acceptance, [and] we’ll have an opportunity to drive value-added services over time.”
For the quarter, Visa processed more than $2.9 trillion in total credit and debit card transactions, up 20% year-over-yar on a constant dollar basis, with $1.4 trillion occurring in the U.S. market. The company’s net revenue totaled $7.06 billion, up 25%.
