Visa Collects the Consumerism Tax

The payments network makes a global consumer economy possible by being the largest middleman between banks, merchants, and customers. It is a functional institution, but serves the banks.

Visa logo on a Visa-branded credit card in 2022. Photo by David Dias. Source.

Visa is the publicly-traded U.S. corporation behind the worldwide VisaNet payments network that processed an estimated 193 billion credit and debit card transactions with a volume of $11.6 trillion in 2022.¹ Visa is by far the market leader in credit cards in the U.S., where it is responsible for 52.8% of cards in circulation.² Globally, an estimated 40% of card transactions take place using its products, with the main regional holdout and competitor to Visa being China’s UnionPay.³ As of 2023, Visa connected about 15,000 financial institutions to over 100 million merchant locations to 4.2 billion cards worldwide.⁴ Owing to its status as a fundamental pillar of the global consumer economy, Visa is unsurprisingly one of the world’s most valuable and most profitable companies despite being a dead player.