Visa USA Sees 15.7% Increase in Sales Volume

Spending on Visa cards during the first week of November rose to approximately $22 billion, according to Visas Holiday SpendTrak report. Consumer spending on Visa branded credit cards surpassed $10.8 billion while debit spending reached more than $9 billion, a 5.8 and 28.7 percent increase from the same period in 2003, respectively. There are more than 450 million Visa branded credit and debit cards in the United States. Those cards represent over 14 percent of Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), indicating that consumers spend more than $14 out of every $100 using a Visa branded card. Only cash and checks have a greater share of PCE, making Visa products a strong indicator of consumer spending behavior. To ensure that retailers are able to provide speedy check-out and minimize abandoned purchases, Visa recently upgraded VisaNet, the largest and most advanced payment system in the world, to sustain the expected 6,200 transactions per second during the peak of the holiday shopping season. Thats 21 percent more than last years peak, when Visa processed an average of 5,119 transactions per second sustained during a one-hour period on December 24. The upgrade also ensures Member financial institutions, cardholders and merchants that Visa can deliver secure and reliable payments even during the busiest shopping days of the year. In fact, VisaNet is designed to provide sufficient capacity levels so that the system can processes not only Visa debit and credit payments, but also stands-in for other payment brands, processors and financial institutions during peak processing periods. For the first week of November, Visa spending in the retail category rose by 7.7 percent, totaling $7.3 billion. Spending in the retail category of Discount, Mass Apparel and Drug Stores experienced the biggest surge during the week, showing a 18.4 percent increase compared to the same time period in 2003. Other retail categories that showed strong growth compared to the same week in 2003 include: -- Home and Garden (12.7 percent growth) -- Department Stores and Apparel (8.9 percent growth)