Research archive for V

On Tuesday night, Visa released a strong set of results, highlighting that the world is returning to normal. I love reading the Visa numbers because they show how people are spending their money, which tells us a lot about the state of the economy. The company noted that there has been a moderate recovery in travel spending and there are more in-person payments again. Overall, Visa processed 21% more transactions.

Earnings season is in full swing, and here's another one. Visa reported great results on Tuesday night. Remember that this company facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, mostly through Visa-branded credit cards and debit cards.

Visa just announced that they are buying CurrencyCloud for GBP700 million. CurrencyCloud specialises in real-time international payments and allows its customers to hold multi-currency digital wallets. If you have made an international payment recently, you will know how slow and expensive it can be. This is an industry ripe for disruption!

In my very humble opinion, the primary use-case for cryptocurrencies will be to make transacting easier. Not to speculate, trade and hopefully become rich. That is why we prefer to hold companies like Visa and PayPal that make the movement of money more efficient.

A few months ago we spoke about how Visa was forced to abandon their $5 billion acquisition of Plaid due to regulatory issues. Yesterday, Visa announced that they are buying Tink for $2 billion. Roughly speaking, Tink is the European version of North America's Plaid.

Visa reported better-than-expected earnings for the latest quarter, boosted by an 11% year-on-year increase in payments volume. The payment processing giant has been sluggish of late due to the lack of cross-border transactions and limited travel.

Visa is another company where the "share price hasn't done anything" recently. In fact over the last 12 months, it has gone backwards. Its 52 week high is $220 and it is currently trading around $195 a share.

Early last year we covered Visa's attempted $5.3 billion acquisition of a fintech business called Plaid. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the deal has been called off by the Department of Justice on anti-competitive grounds.

Physical credit cards will soon be a thing of the past in my opinion. They expire, get dirty, get lost and even break. The worst part about them is the onerous ordering and delivery process.

Visa released its September quarter numbers showing a double-digit decline in revenues, as closed borders and limited travel hurt its high margin business. The recovery so far has been led by contactless payments as people stay close to home and spend more on their local travel adventures.

The payments space is an exciting investment theme. One which we are heavily exposed to via Visa. It has been very interesting to follow the US payments space as a South African because we are ahead of them in this area.

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai. These are CEOs of large businesses, have a huge amount of influence and are all household names these days. Ever heard of Alfred F Kelly? Not many have. He is the CEO and Chairman of Visa, a stock held by 501 Vestact clients. I have decided to give you a bit more information about him.

Visa was out with third quarter results after the bell last night. At first glance they seemed to be in line with revised expectations, both in terms of transaction volumes and profits. Further earnings guidance for the rest of the year was not provided, but the tone of management commentary was confident. The stock softened a bit after hours.

Visa may have taken a knock because travellers have not been swiping their cards in foreign currencies but they sure have benefitted from a huge shift to ecommerce. According to this Market Watch article, 13 million Visa cardholders made ecommerce transactions for the first time ever during March in Latin America. Visa also saw an 18% rise in US digital sales excluding travel. Face to Face transactions dropped 45%.

Another Vestact stock to report last week was Visa; they were reporting for Q2 of their 2020 financial year. Revenue for the quarter came in at $5.9 billion and earnings per share of $1.39, both beating the expectation of the street.