Visa Company Update: CFO Interview at Barclays

Visa CFO Christopher Suh spoke at Barclays 14th Annual Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum with analyst Ramsey El-Assal.

TLDR: Visa keeps finding ways to alleviate pain points for customers, and interesting ways to increase value.

Q2 Recap

. . . let's recap Q2 a bit. Financially, it was a strong quarter for us. We started a 10% revenue growth, revenue and EPS exceeding our expectations. From an underlying driver standpoint, we continue to see relatively stable volumes. Total -- global total payment volume grew 8% in Q2, which was the same growth as in Q1. And then as you sort of look at by region, in the U.S., payment volumes was up 6%, which is, again, stable to Q1 once you normalize for the impact of extra day for leap year. And outside the U.S., we continue to see very strong growth in most of our markets. LAC, EMEA, Europe ex U.K. all growing at 19% or higher, and again, relatively stable with our first quarter. The one exception, which we talked about on the call was we did see a little slower growth in Asia in Q2 relative to Q1 primarily attributable to the macroeconomic conditions in Mainland China. And I guess it's important to also point out that, that volume doesn't drive a lot of revenue for us, and so it didn't have a meaningful financial impact.

Suh

This is good to see that the volume in China doesn't impact Visa very much. I'm all for making money out of China, as long as it doesn't impact operations when China's economy falters.

Moving on:

Cross-border, which is obviously an important part of our business, grew 16% in Q2, also 16% in Q1, so again stable, with both travel and e-comm cross-border continue to grow very healthy. . . . So all in all, I would say the word of the day was stable. We continue to see relative stability across the underlying drivers of our business.

Suh

Stability, you say? Color me intrigued! Stability in revenues across business segments is grossly underrated.

Visa Direct

A great program that gives more power to users. A company that finds new and interesting ways to enable more power to users in their finance is a great sign.

More about Visa Direct from their website:

They also have more than 500 partners with Visa Direct. You can see the list here: Visa Direct | Find a Partner | Visa

Back to the transcript, Christopher Suh goes into the performance of Visa Direct:

So Visa Direct has been, to use your words, a home run. It's performing really, really well. Growth has been outstanding.

This quarter alone, we talked about Visa Direct transactions exceeding 31% growth, which is a fantastic quarter for us. I do think -- and for those not familiar with Visa Direct, it's a set of capabilities that really expand beyond the traditional consumer to business flow which is sort of the traditional Visa business that people think about.

So expanding into P2P, G2C, B2C and small ticket B2B, lots of acronyms there, but I think you get the point. It's an expansion of the different types of flows that we can move money around in.

Suh

Great to see all-around growth here.

The icing on the cake: