Visa 2007 Annual Report Download - page 17

Table of Contents
or other events. Visa Resolve Online, which is mandatory for all Visa customers, provides real-time access to Visa transaction data, electronic transfer of
substantiating documents and automated management of communications between issuers and acquirers.
Value-Added Information Services. We provide our customers with a range of additional information-based business analytics and applications, as well
as the transaction data and associated infrastructure required to support them. Through these services, we support and enhance our customers' business
intelligence capabilities, loyalty applications, operational and management performance metrics, transaction research and commercial card reporting.
Processing Infrastructure
We own and operate VisaNet, our secure, centralized, global processing platform, which consists of three synchronized processing centers. In addition,
Visa Europe operates one processing center in the United Kingdom, which is part of our synchronized system in accordance with the terms of the framework
agreement. In addition, we are building a new data center on the east coast of the United States. These centers are linked by a global telecommunications
network, which is engineered for redundancy. Intelligent access points around the world complete our global processing infrastructure and enable merchants
and financial institutions worldwide to access our core processing and value-added services.
In September 2006, we completed a five-year reengineering program, in which we, among other things, consolidated the authorization functions for our
credit, debit, prepaid and ATM transactions into one technology platform called Visa Integrated Payment, or VIP. VIP is a modular processing platform,
which is flexible and secure and combines global reach with the processing power to support our future growth and product innovation.
The following is a summary of critical attributes of our processing infrastructure:
Centralized Architecture. Unlike the processing platforms of some of our primary competitors, VisaNet is built on a centralized architecture rather than
a distributed architecture. As a result, we are able to view and analyze each authorization transaction we process in real-time and can provide value-added
information, such as risk scoring or loyalty applications, to the issuer while the transaction data is being routed through our system.
Redundancy. Our global telecommunications network and processing centers are designed for redundancy and fail-over. Our newest processing center
houses multiple authorization engines, each supported by redundant power and telecommunications circuits. This new architecture complements our multiple
processing center architecture, provides improved fail-over technology and helps to ensure that our VisaNet system is always available and has enough
processing power to meet the growing demand for electronic payments.
Modular Architecture. In the VIP reengineering project that we completed in September 2006, we replaced a complex web of legacy code with a
streamlined, layered, modular architecture. We believe that this new architecture significantly reduces the time, complexity and cost involved in adding
functions or modifying the system to support emerging forms of payments, such as contactless and mobile payments. We also believe that this streamlined
architecture was instrumental in our ability to implement account level processing on our systems in less than 12 months.
Processing Scale. During fiscal 2007, we processed more than 78 billion authorization, clearing and settlement requests. Based on tests that we
conducted with IBM in July 2005, we estimate that VisaNet is capable of processing more than 12,000 transaction messages per second. We believe that the
scale of our processing network provides us with a significant cost advantage over our competitors.
16