Visa

“Visa and MasterCard have a hard two and a half second limit on interaction between the network issuing bank and the merchant and the acquiring bank.”

“That's why Starbucks invented Starbucks Pay, because they wanted to stop having to pay. It's like these prepaid, they only have to pay one time. You chart, you put 50 dollars on your Starbucks account, well, they only have to pay Visa, MasterCard, and everybod…”

“Visa, largest payments network in the world, handles at peak during the holidays, somewhere around 20,000 financial transactions per second. Cloudflare handles about half a billion internet transactions per second.”

“I'm spending a lot of time with, you know, Shopify you know, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express you know, Intuit, the companies that actually deal with these small businesses and saying, how can we bring together the tools in order to make sure that th…”

“I give Visa so much money, and I thank them every day for the great network they run, that this is incremental business they have because of our services. So as part of it, they give us lower rates that we pass on to our merchants.”

“And so the Visa brand and MasterCard brands are much more than just a payment rail. They're this consumer warm blanket that created e-commerce. Without those brands, you'd never enter your dark card and have Amazon ship your product.”

“It may be lower costs, but I would argue Visa and MasterCard can make the cost practically zero if they wanted to, but their brands offer much more value than just pushing money to someone.”

“His biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure. And the association model allowed everybody to save face, but at the same time, take the credit. And that's how he won.”

“For him Visa was a failure, if you talk to him, because he only got to release The simple version of it, which was payments, he wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like blockchains and smart contracts are today, but he was probably 60 years ahead of hi…”

“That's where the market just expands massively once you throw in labor, because it's like you have this tiny, tiny market for software, which by the way is not that tiny. It's like a trillion dollars. Concentrically around that, you have like, you know, big on…”

“What is the only kind of baby that Advent and Stripe and Block could have together? And I think there's one, which is you are creating a competitor to Visa and MasterCard.”

“In the case of Visa, the team that was actively day-to-day working on the transaction was actually quite small and everyone else was a hundred percent focused on continuing to grow the business.”

“Visa actually using it themselves to actually move money on their own internal network instead of using the legacy banking system”

“After this piece came out, which speculated that agents would get rid of all the three percent interchange fees and move everybody to settle transactions on stablecoins, all the financial stocks got hit on Monday. Amex down eight percent, Capital One down eigh…”

“Where the crazy abuse is, is all the middlemen in those transactions. So Visa and MasterCard, they don't really abuse the merchant, but the abuse happens with all their partners. Like the independent sales organizations that work for the banks that work for Vi…”

“I think we had to lay off 70% of the company, and then we eventually turned it around and sold it to Visa”

“We hosted a dinner for the CEO of Visa, and I sat Zach at Plaid right next to Alec Kelly at Visa.”

“We have this deal to sell the company for just over five billion dollars and it's a fixed price.”

“And then we looked at through the docs and like they have these things called like material adverse event. So you can get out of a deal if something crazy happens. And there was a provision there that says you cannot get out of the deal, even in the case of a …”

“Stripe, Visa, everybody's gonna have their own stable coin.”

“And we think with the Gentic, you're just going to see another channel that's going to be very helpful in certain types of commerce, in certain segments of commerce which doesn't mean that, you know, the existing channels are going to go away. I just think the…”

“We've introduced things like data tokens help consumers with better signals that they have associated with their credentials that, you know, platforms can use to provide a better discovery process.”

“We've introduced incremental data payloads on things what we call in our APIs called payment instructions and signals, where we actually try to match the consumer natural language intent to the thing the agent is going to buy before we actually release the cre…”

“I I'd say in about six months or so, we'll start to see like some early statistically relevant enough data sets. Where we can start to like draw conclusions. That's like my best guess, but you know, it all remains to be seen how quickly some of these things ge…”

“So we've done a bit of work with a number of our partners, including, you know, partners like Cloudflare that do a really, really good job at the CDN level. To analyze bots and bot traffic and what to make available in a merchant environment, like, you know, p…”

“Like four or five months ago, we had seen an increase of roughly about 1200% in, in agentic traffic to merchant websites. That number in itself has forexed in the last five months.”

“We're fortunate that, that we don't need to fundraise and we don't really have too much of a portfolio construction overlay, right? Is that we care about financial returns, but you know, our treasurer is not coming to my team, sort of pounding the table for DP…”

“In the context of six hundred billion market cap company that Visa is what we do financially is not going to move the needle”

“So you have general AI agents. It's very early days, but they will become economic actors. They will buy things. They will sell things. They will you know, conceptually push the button to move money.”

“We function kind of like in the credit card industry, kind of like a visa and mastercard. They are not the brand that gives you the credit card and they're not the folks you buy stuff from.”

“If during the exact same moment, two transactions are authorized at the exact same time on the same card from the same balance, then both would, in theory, be approved.”

“A big misconception is that the reason payments are maybe more expensive than some merchants would like them to be online is because visa takes such a big cut. That's not true at all. One of the reasons that maybe payments, card payments might be a little bit …”

“My, like contrary opinion is that I think Visa and MasterCard are more technology companies, and if you look at their, like, profit margin on the gross payment volume, it's like 10 basis points. It's like vapor. I think the issuer and receiver bank, those are …”

“If they could remove the banks out of the loop and just do stable cone transfers behind the scenes, I think they become a lot more successful and they can do a lot more for, you know, a lot less.”

“It's like literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than visa, more than dollars, more than anything.”

“As part of Aadhaar, today we have UPI, which takes away the need for Visa and MasterCard, so it's a three percent tax on the economy that Indians don't pay, but everybody in the U.S. Pays.”

“And normal people are not going to switch from credit cards because it's just kind of entrenched. But the way Visa deals with like banks, I think it's going to change because they don't have to care about banks as much anymore. They can actually just do everyt…”

“The first one that comes to mind is Capital One and Discover. Huge deal. This is not a tuck in. This like materially changes their whole business model. And the reason is because it creates the largest credit card issuer by loan volume, because it allows Capit…”

“There's about two trillion dollars of us commercial corporate card spent. And so what that represents is the top 100 issuing banks on MasterCard and Visa plus Amex commercial card volume is around two trillion a year.”

“So like last month, it was something like two trillion in stable coin volume, which is more than trillion with a T, which is more than Visa.”

“For those tracking it, like, stablecoins have grown dramatically in usage. It's now in the trillions of dollars, you know, higher than Visa per month.”

“So like last month, it was something like two trillion in stable coin volume, which is more than trillion with a T, which is more than Visa.”

“If you look at stablecoins today, they're a two hundred and thirty billion dollar market. Those two hundred and thirty billion dollars rotate on chain to the tune of about 27 trillion dollars last year in 2024, which was greater than Visa's total settlement vo…”

“If you use a Visa MasterCard, the US government will potentially have strings that they can use to control one day, perhaps even shut the system down if needed.”

“The fact is that when your economy is reliant on Visa MasterCard, you're paying a one person tax to a third country, right?”

“I mean, we owned both those companies at their IPOs and had meaningful positions and, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, never should have sold.”

“If you look at the largest payment systems globally, whether it is Visa or MasterCard or American Express in the US, or whether it is Alipay in China, they have a substantial, if not majority credit component. In India, UPI is massive, but it's debit only. So …”

“Stablecoin usage. At the end of the second quarter of 2024 was about 1.1 billion transactions that summed to 8.5 trillion dollars of transaction volume. If you compare that to Visa over the same period, it was more than double Visa's transaction volume.”

“There's another fact that you should know in North America, which is Visa and MasterCard have the two highest operating margin percentages in our markets total. Like they're over 60%.”

“Our headline rate at the end was one percent transaction fee, which you compare that to a Visa MasterCard product that merchants pay, you know, three plus if you're on Stripe. Maybe you're on world pay or somebody like that and get a better rate, but our cost …”

“I just think this is the beginning of a drumbeat that we're going to hear for a decade.”

“They raise sixteen billion dollars at a one hundred and four billion dollar market cap, making it, I think, the third largest IPO of all time at that point behind Visa and, ironically, General Motors coming out of the bankruptcy during 2008.”

“And ended up making what I think was a 51 49 call to say, like, it's the right answer to sell the business. For a variety of reasons at the time. A year later, we had that same meeting, same group of people sitting in my living room, having the same, same styl…”

“When we did the sale to Visa that ultimately didn't go through, we raised a funding round afterwards. One of the most complex things to do in that funding round was I wanted to try to max the number of people that could participate in the secondary. We couldn'…”

“It's been like a nice debate, and then at the end, Visa and MasterCard win. So but so I think that's what I read into the settlement”

“We invested in CurrencyCloud. Mike Lavin, the founder, I think had 30 years experience in fintech. He was so well placed to understand actually what those buyers wanted and ultimately sold the business to Visa for a billion dollars.”

“And so what Bill Ackman does is he goes and he immediately texts the CEO of Visa, and he sends him the article. He's like, your company is enabling this. These guys are making money off of this. You better do something about this. And the CEO of Visa is like, …”

“I mean, they have over 50% net income margins.”

“I think Visa was our best episode.”

“It was not North Dakota, but South Dakota that first changed their usury laws to support credit cards, which is why all of your credit cards, or so many of them, are mailed from there today.”