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 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.