Before I begin, I would like to re-iterate my disclaimer. I provide consulting services to Visa and may know a thing or two about the company that may not be publicly discussed. This article, however, is based on only the  information available to the public through press releases, articles, 10-K  reports and other artifacts. My NDA safely protects any information known not to the public.

I often bump into executives who have mis-conceptions on what Visa is and what they do. Are they a financial institution, a network, a service provider, an ATM network manager, an issuer, acquirer and so on?  There are several places on the Internet to find out what they are and what they are not. My focus here is to show what assets they have, what services they provide, what segments and markets they serve and who their immediate customers are.  There are some common metrics used to measure the size and I have used those numbers (wherever available) to how where their focus is on.

I will cover MasterCard, Discover and Amex in my subsequent posts but here you go for Visa!

Please note that the data I have used is for Visa Inc worldwide ( excluding Visa Europe which is NOT part of Visa). All the figures are from 2011 Visa annual report.