When the world's largest credit card company released its third-quarter results in July, investors were adamant to check if issues from Visa’s first two quarters still persisted, especially for low cross-border payment growth. The doubt proved to be misplaced, with revenue rising to an 11% increase YoY at 5.8 billion, and adjusted earnings per share saw a 14% increase over last year's third quarter with growth at $1.37. The revenue and earnings growth was driven by a 12% increase in processed transactions and a 5% increase in payment volume.

However it wasn’t the numbers that showed the promise of a bright future for Visa, but its many efforts represented in acquisitions and FinTech partnerships to grow its network and expand its reach, through the management team’s renewed understanding of FinTech companies' roles in the payments ecosystem leading to new deals.

With a meager one acquisition in 2018 and none in 2017, Visa has announced a substantial collection of finalized deals in 2019 as follows:

FinTech Acquisitions

Earthport: Outbidding their giant rival MasterCard, Visa was able to reach 99% of bank accounts in 88 countries through the acquisition of this cross-border payments specialist in early 2019.

Rambus: Visa acquired this tokenization specialist to tokenize card numbers, as well as bank accounts, card networks in the region and other credentials from outside of its existing network.

Verifi: a company that specializes in connecting banks with merchant data to settle transactional disputes, Verifi was acquired by Visa to resolve these conflicts in a fast & fair manner. Visa CEO Al Kelly described it as a "best-in-class dispute resolution tool".

Payworks: the provider of a cloud-based, PoS platform that empowers sellers to easily add new payment methods was also acquired by Visa to strengthen its reach and expand its network.

FinTech Partnerships

Visa partnered up with several FinTech startups to further expand its network capabilities. These partnerships include:

Go-Jek: Visa established a partnership with the Southeast Asian wonder app, a platform that witnessed 108 million downloads and that includes a variety of services like food delivery, laundry, ridesharing and more, in order to empower payments and make them easier for Go-Pay, Go-Jek’s digital wallet.

Paymate: With more than 35,000 buyers & sellers, India-based FinTech company Paymate offers a B2B payment portal, for which Visa intends to offer better reconciliation data for buyers' accounts-payable divisions.

Setoo: Visa also partnered up with this European insurer, to enable them to use Visa Direct to settle claims and pay them quickly & efficiently.

All in all, it seems Visa is paying more attention to the promising FinTech sector, coming a long way in understanding that collaborations & partnerships with emerging financial technology startups and companies is the best way forward into an inevitable digital financial future.

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Visa, Al Kelly, Partnerships, Acquisitions, Earthport, Rambus, Verifi, Payworks, Go-Jek, Paymate, Setoo, Startups, Fintech, Fintech Egypt