Executive Summary
Visa Inc. operates as a payments technology company worldwide. The company facilitates digital payments among consumers, merchants, financial institutions, businesses, strategic partners, and government entities. It operates VisaNet, a transaction processing network that enables authorization, clearing, and settlement of payment transactions. In addition, the company offers card products, platforms, and value-added services. It provides its services under the Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink, VPAY, and PLUS brands. Since being founded in 1958 they now control 40% of the global market shares in payments processing across the globe and possess the most secure and reliable digital transaction processing infrastructure in the industry with a net worth of over $500 billion. The company operates in an essential, irreplaceable industry and their network cannot be replicated ensuring their financial security. Visa has been dominating the market for 15 years (with impressive increasing net income over these years) and has maintained a superiority over their competitors over this time period and appears to be performing extremely well as it is currently the 10th most valued company in the world. The company is listed on New York Stock Exchange, S&P 500 stock market and Dow Jones Industrial Average, at a stock price of $240 per share. Based on the Discounted Cash Flow and Multiples valuation, the Visa Inc stock is undervalued and a buy recommendation is issued.
Introduction
Visa Inc is a American multinational financial services corporation specialising in providing services to large scale financial businesses. Their main service is to provide digital transactions between merchants and consumers by providing financial institutes with Visa branded products. As Visa is a global payments technology company they are reliant only on their cloud infrastructure rather than any specific suppliers. They also cater to smaller businesses specifically with their newer products such as their small business toolkit, their analytics platform or their consulting services. The company also produces ongoing improvements to their main existing product: digital transactions, namely their “3D Secure”, the “Visa Token Service” or even their numerous analytical intelligence solutions. Founded in 1958 as part of the “BankAmericard” Credit Card Program by the Bank of America, it immediately displayed its practicality in a time where America was plagued with revolving credit accounts from several different merchants as it provided a unified financial and appeared to be the first successful “all purpose credit card”. After a few years of refining, by 1961 the BankAmericard Program had become profitable and, due to the confidentiality of its success, it had no competitors until 1966. Rebranded as “Visa” in 1976 and remained as such till the present it has become one of the world's most valuable companies, boasting a net worth of $494.97 billion as of August 2, 2023 and $505.17 billion as of August 10, 2023. As of today Visa provides digital payments across more than 200 countries and territories connecting consumers, merchants, financial institutions and businesses. In 2021, the Visa market share was 39% meaning they accounted for almost two-fifths of all credit card purchases worldwide. The runner-up UnionPay has a slightly lower share by purchase transactions than Visa’s market. In 2021, 34% of global credit card purchases were made using UnionPay. MasterCard was the third most popular card brand worldwide. This brand stood behind 24% of all credit card transactions. UnionPay also focuses almost solely on China and due to their domestic approach Visa has the ability to grow significantly on a global scale whereas their main competitor cannot.(Due to the nature of their business model of providing services to financial institutions, a common misconception is the assumption that Visa issues physical cards/credit/rates/fees although they only provide the service of monetary transactions.)