Visa 2009 Annual Report Download - page 5

Table of Contents
PART I
ITEM 1. Business
Overview
Visa operates the world's largest retail electronic payments network and manages a leading global payments brand. We have more branded credit and
debit cards in circulation, more transactions and greater total volume than any of our competitors. We facilitate global commerce through the transfer of value
and information among financial institutions, merchants, consumers, businesses and government entities. We provide financial institutions, our primary
customers, with product platforms encompassing consumer credit, debit, prepaid and commercial payments. VisaNet, our secure, centralized, global
processing platform, enables us to provide financial institutions and merchants with a wide range of product platforms, transaction processing and related
value-added services.
Our business primarily consists of the following:
• we own, manage and promote a family of well-known, widely accepted payment brands, including Visa, Visa Electron, PLUS and Interlink,
which we license to our customers for use in their payment programs;
• we offer a wide range of branded payments product platforms, which our customers use to develop and offer credit, debit, prepaid and cash
access programs for cardholders (individuals, businesses and government entities);
• we provide transaction processing and value-added services to our customers through VisaNet, Visa Debit Processing Services and Visa
Processing Services;
• we invest in new services and processing platforms to facilitate more convenient and innovative payment methods, such as mobile payments and
eCommerce;
• we continually improve the security of our network and our payments services to improve the reliability of our global processing infrastructure
and the security of cardholder information; and
• we adopt and enforce a common set of rules adhered to by our customers to ensure the efficient and secure functioning of our payments network
and the maintenance and promotion of our brands.
We derive revenues primarily from fees paid by our customers based on payments volume, transactions that we process and certain other related
services that we provide.
In fiscal 2009:
• we launched our first global advertising campaign, entitled "More people go with Visa." The new campaign enables us to align our worldwide
marketing under a single theme that highlights the superior value Visa delivers versus cash and checks and enables us to achieve cost efficiencies
by consolidating our global marketing efforts;
• we brought online our largest and most sophisticated global data center, and decommissioned an older facility;
• we formed Visa Processing Services Pte. Ltd., or VPS, a joint venture with Yalamanchili International Pte. Ltd., a payments processor and
software company with operations in Asia. We expect VPS to extend multi-currency and multi-language debit, credit and prepaid processing
capabilities to financial institutions, processors and payment companies outside of the United States;
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