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Visa's infinite runway
Notes from Visa Investor Day 2025
Jevgenijs Kazanins
March 09, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Hey!
A few weeks ago, Visa held an Investor Day. It was a very insightful event that made one thing clear: Visa has an infinite growth runway. Consumer card payments still have plenty of growth potential, and Visa is actively expanding into new areas like account-to-account and commercial payments.
Visa Investor Day lasted over 6 hours and included a 161-slide presentation. So today, instead of my traditional weekly essay, I’ve decided to offer a summary, highlighting my key takeaways from the event. While I still recommend watching the full event, this summary will give you a good sense of what was discussed.
Let’s go!
Jevgenijs
p.s. if you have feedback just reply to this email or ping me on X/Twitter
All images and quotes in this article are from Visa Investor Day 2025
Visa $V ( ▼ 0.51% ) has become a beast. There are 4.7 billion Visa-branded cards in circulation, accepted at 150 million merchant locations worldwide. In fiscal 2024 (Visa’s fiscal year ends in September), Visa cardholders spent a total of $15.7 trillion using their cards, including both payments and cash withdrawals.
When I think about what makes Visa the leader that it is, it's our global scale, global reach, capabilities, services, network reliability, innovation brand, our people and our maniacal focus on serving and delivering for our clients.
Visa is also a financial success. Over the past 10 years, Visa's market capitalization grew from $160 billion to nearly $675 billion, and its stock delivered a 449% return to shareholders, outperforming the Nasdaq 100 (+395%) and S&P 500 (+230%).
Throughout our history, Visa has driven strong financial returns with consistent double-digit revenue growth and high teens EPS growth, supported by effective capital allocation. Since fiscal 2016, we have generated more than $120 billion of free cash flow.
Visa continues to open up. In 2016, it launched the Visa Developer Platform, giving developers access to its network. In the 2020s, Visa introduced the "network of networks" concept, enabling interoperability with other payment networks. Looking ahead, the company aims to grow by unbundling its services and offering them as "Visa-as-a-Service".
In 2016, we made the very deliberate decision to further open up our network, this time to developers of all kinds. We launched our Visa Developer platform and Visa Fintech Fast Track, creating simple and easy ways for developers around the world to integrate Visa into their products, greatly accelerating the rise of fintech.
Over the years, Visa has built and acquired a number of services, such as fraud prevention. The "Visa-as-a-Service" model allows the company to sell these services to a broader range of businesses, even those that are not Visa card issuers or acquirers.
We are excited about Visa-as-a-Service and the opportunity to grow and continue adding new high-growth, high-margin businesses, expanding our suite of solutions and selling them into a wide array of customers and ecosystem partners that are scaling Visa globally.
Visa has four pillars of growth: card and non-card consumer payments, commercial payments and money movement solutions (referred to as “new flows”), as well as value-added services.
