Visa is the largest payment card processor in the world and operates many of Australia’s debit cards.

Visa is an American company that was the first major international mass market payment card provider to make a big impact in Australia.
Payment processors allow money to transfer between consumers and merchants who use different banks.  Payment processors make debit card transactions possible as vendors would have to maintain accounts with an impossibly large selection of banks.

Like its arch-rival MasterCard, Visa is quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, although up until 2008 it was a co-operative jointly owned by 21,000 institutions worldwide that issued Visa cards.

Visa started in California in 1958 as one of the first successful credit cards and was first offered by Bank of America.  It involved the sending out of a large number of unsolicited credit cards that were pre-approved, and it was the first time that this method was tried.  MasterCard was started in opposition as a joint venture of banks including the Bank of California, Wells Fargo and Crocker National Bank.

Along with MasterCard Visa offered credit cards in conjunction with Australian banks, competing with the then dominant Bankcard which in the 1980s had as many as five million customers.  The foreign cards soon surpassed Bankcard, which finally finished in 2006.  In the 1990s Visa started offering debit cards in competition with the home grown EFTPOS system.

Debit cards differ from credit cards in that they are mostly dependent on a bank account.  They do not tend to be financed through interest rates, but are instead financed by annual fees and charges to shop owners to have their credit card transactions processed.

Visa has a proprietary network system, which is a centralised system that has terminals that feed into hubs.  This has been criticised for not being as resilient as MasterCard’s internet like Banknet network.

Visa very much sells itself in Australia as an international card that can be used almost anywhere in the world.  Visa is the world’s largest credit and debit card provider and does not have the coverage issues that many other cards have.

Visa debit cards have an innovative zero liability policy on their debit cards.  This means that if there are unauthorised transactions on the card either through fraud or theft then there will be no liability to the original card holder.  A large number of banks and credit unions currently offer the Visa card including ANZ, Citibank and Suncorp.