visa

Visa Inc. ( or ) (also known as Visa, stylized as VISA) is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, gift cards, and debit cards. Visa does not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers; rather, Visa provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they then use to offer credit, debit, prepaid and cash-access programs to their customers. In 2015, the Nilson Report, a publication that tracks the credit card industry, found that Visa's global network (known as VisaNet) processed 100 billion transactions during 2014 with a total volume of US$6.8 trillion.
Visa has operations across all continents worldwide with the exception of Antarctica. Nearly all Visa transactions worldwide are processed through VisaNet at one of two secure facilities: Operations Center East, located near Ashburn, Virginia; and Operations Center Central, located near Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Both data centers are heavily secured against natural disasters, crime, and terrorism; can operate independently of each other and from external utilities if necessary; and can handle up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations every second. Every transaction is checked past 500 variables including 100 fraud-detection parameters—such as the location and spending habits of the customer and the merchant's location – before being accepted.
Visa is the world's second-largest card payment organization (debit and credit cards combined), after being surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015, based on annual value of card payments transacted and number of issued cards. Because UnionPay's size is based primarily on the size of its domestic market, Visa is dominant in the rest of the world outside of China, with 50% market share of global card payments minus China.

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