Visa Europe: the year ended June 2015 was „the most succesfull year ever”

Visa Europe has today announced its highest ever revenues of €2.31 billion – up 25% year-on year (year to June 2015). Visa Europe now accounts for more than €1 in every €5.70 spent in Europe today while the number of Visa cards issued in Europe now stands at 522 million – or more than one Visa card per adult. Point-of sale spending has risen by 7.7% in the last year (to €1.58 trillion).

Visa Europe CEO Nicolas Huss said: “Our new Annual Report shows that, financially, this was our most successful year ever – and by quite some distance. We’ve done that while maintaining always on delivery with 100% availability of our systems for more than 100 months in a row and maintaining trust in the system by keeping fraud at record low levels of less than 5c for every €100 spent (0.044% year to June 2015) and investing in multiple layers of cyber and data security.”

Across Europe, there are now more than 143 million contactless cards accepted at more than 3 million contactless terminals – and from 2015 onwards, many new Visa terminal implementations will be contactless enabled. More than €16.1 billion was spent on contactless Visa cards in the 12 months to June 2015 – a 335% increase on the previous year – this equated to more than 1.4 billion transactions in a year.

The very same terminals can automatically be used to make payments via Visa contactless cards, micro tags, wearables and mobile NFC solutions, such as Android Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

“Contactless transaction growth is off the chart – in 2015 we went through the billion contactless transaction-a-year barrier – and in a leading market like the UK it’s fast making cash seem peculiar. We’ve also launched a tokenisation service that devalues sensitive account data and brings more security to digital payments. Importantly it enables these transactions to flow across the existing industry infrastructure. In the first instance, it has supported the launch of Apple Pay in the UK, and is set to become the basis for many more payment products and solutions in the months and years ahead.”

According to the press release, Contactless transactions reached 1.7bn transactions in the year to September 2015. In the UK, contactless transactions now make up 1 in 7 face-to-face Visa transactions (Oct 2015), compared to 1 in 25 just one year ago.

The time is right for Visa to come together as one global company

Visa Inc. and Visa Europe announced in November a definitive agreement for Visa Inc. to acquire Visa Europe, creating a single global company. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close in Visa Inc.’s fiscal third quarter of 2016 (April-June).

Nicolas Huss commented: “We are performing extremely well as Visa Europe. However, taking a long-term perspective and against a backdrop of a rapidly evolving landscape, increased globalisation, intensifying regulation and competition, there is no better time to come together as one company.

“The time is right because scale, speed to market and investment are critical to bringing competitive advantage. Integrating into one global business will ensure we have the financial strength and operational scale to accelerate the next generation of payments throughout Europe building deep partnerships with our existing and new clients.”

Visa Europe’s Annual Report 2015 can be found at https://annualreport.visaeurope.com/

About Visa Europe

Visa Europe is a payments technology business owned and operated by member banks and other payment service providers from 38 countries. Visa Europe is also the largest transaction processor in Europe, responsible for processing more than 18 billion transactions annually.

There are more than 500m Visa cards in Europe, while €1 in every €6 spent in Europe is on a Visa card. Total expenditure on Visa cards exceeds €2 trillion annually, with €1.5 trillion spent at point-of-sale.