Investing in the ecosystem

At Visa, trust, security and reliability are fundamental to everything we do. As a leading payments technology company, we take seriously our responsibility to maintain the global ecosystem and continually improve capabilities that enable individuals, businesses and economies to thrive.

This is an undertaking that has grown more complex and challenging in recent years. As commerce has moved increasingly online, the opportunity for fraud and cyber threats has grown. At the same time, fraud rates have remained near-historic lows, at less than one-tenth of one percent for the past two decades. And while Visa’s processing volumes have nearly doubled over the last 5 years,[1] VisaNet, our core authorization platform, has consistently performed at 99.999 percent reliability.[2]

To manage the constantly changing threat environment and growing demands on our infrastructure, we devote significant resources to our talent and technology. Over the last five years, we’ve invested nearly $9B in enhancing and securing our core technology platforms and launching new products and capabilities for our clients, partners and employees.[3] These investments include:

• World-Class Technology Platform: At the heart of Visa lies a technology infrastructure that powers more than 138 billion payments annually[4], each in just a few milliseconds. This platform consists of hundreds of software applications, a massive fleet of best-in-class hardware, highly resilient data centers, and a vast telecommunications network spanning more than 10 million route miles[5]. Each of these components is wrapped in multiple security technologies and backed by numerous redundant layers, so if one component fails, another kicks in to ensure continuous processing.

 

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