Visa Inc. (NYSE:V), commonly referred to as VISA, is a multinational corporation based in San Francisco, California, USA. The company operates the world's largest retail electronic payment network, managing payments among financial institutions, merchants, consumers, businesses and government entities. Before Visa Incs IPO in early 2008, it was operated as a cooperative of some 21,000 financial institutions that issued and marketed Visa products including credit and debit cards.Use Equity Multiples (as opposed to Enterprise Multiples).



In order to consider how valuing a Financial Institution's balance sheet is different from a non-Financial firm. Consider how an industrials firm wields capital machinery (asset) and the loans (liabilities) it used to finance that asset. The line is blurred in Financial Institutions, which must hold deposit accounts (liabilities) to fuel the issuance of loans (assets).

The same accounts are considered loans as they are held in ownership not of the bank, but of the individual client. In 2006, according to The Nilson Report, Visa held 44% of the credit card market share and 48% of the debit card market share in the United States.

In financial economics, a financial institution acts as an agent that provides financial services for its clients or members. Financial institutions generally fall under financial regulation from a government authority. Common types of financial institutions include banks, building societies, credit unions, stock brokerages, asset management firms, and similar businesses.

Some outstanding rules of the association include rules about how a cardholder must be identified for security, how transactions may be denied by the bank and how banks may cooperate for fraud prevention, and how to keep that identification and fraud protection standard and non-discriminatory. One notable rule is that no merchant accepting Visa, whether a mom-and-pop store or a government body like a university, may establish any minimum purchase, maximum purchase, or surcharge for any Visa (credit) transaction. They may establish surcharges for debit transactions (although lower fees on debit card transactions means that merchants typically encourage use of debit cards by surcharging more for credit cards, where allowed).

In 1958, Bank of America launched its pioneering Bank Americard credit card program in Fresno, California. The product idea was that of a bank branch manager, who stopped by a local store and observed clerks in a back room preparing customers monthly bills.It struck him as inefficient to spend so much time (and money) to prepare and collect bills that were often for paltry amounts, and he wondered if the process could be efficiently centralized, with his banks computer preparing the bills in off-hours.

The original goal of the company was to offer the system across California; however in 1965 the bank began subscribing licensing agreements with a group of banks outside of California. Over the following 11 years, various banks licensed the card system from Bank of America, forming a network of banks backing the Bank Americard system across the United States.

The term Visa was conceived by the company's founder, Dee Hock. He believed that the word was instantly recognizable in many languages in many countries, and that it also denoted universal acceptance. Nowadays, the term VISA has become a recursive backronym for Visa International Service Association.

Visa settled a lawsuit brought by a class of U.S. merchants, including Wal-Mart, for billions of dollars in 2003. According to a website associated with the suit,[23] Visa and MasterCard settled the plaintiffs claims for a total of $3.05 billion, and Visa's share of this settlement is reported to have been the larger. As of early 2005, it is expected to have raised its interchange rate from 1.634% to 1.99%, which can be expected to affect the discount rates paid by retail locations to the banks with which they deal.

In computing, an early tradition in the hacker community (especially at MIT) was to choose acronyms and abbreviations that referred humorously to themselves or to other abbreviations. Perhaps the earliest example in this context, from about 1977 or 1978, is TINT (TINT Is Not TECO), an editor for MagicSix. This inspired the two MIT Lisp Machine editors called EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs) and ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially). These were followed by Richard Stallman's GNU (GNU's not UNIX). Many others also include negatives, such as denials that the thing defined is or resembles something (that the thing defined is, in fact, usually similar to or even derived from).