Dear Stockholders,
At Visa, our efforts to grow our global business help drive the growth of our ecosystem. In other words, as we grow, the "pie" grows. With each new partnership forged, each local business made regional or global, each transit system brought online and each payment credential issued, we increase opportunity for our clients, financial institutions, fintech partners, wallet providers, businesses, governments and consumers who together make up the Visa network. That's what powers commerce around the world.
The past fiscal year has been one of great transition. Collectively, we've seen a shift from lockdowns and social distancing to a still evolving new normal. Much of the world has returned to in-person gatherings. As a company, we adopted a hybrid model with regular opportunities to work collaboratively in the office, together with our colleagues and clients. And we continue to form partnerships across industries and geographies, helping more and more businesses, consumers and markets transition to the digital future.
As I reflect on the end of FY22, Visa's strong financial performance gives me great cause for optimism. Payments volume, processed transactions, and cross-border volume all saw robust growth. Nominal payments volume was $11.6 trillion, up 12% year over year. Reopened borders and reduced restrictions released pent-up travel demand. Cross-border volume, excluding intra Europe, grew 49% year over year in constant dollars. And ecommerce continued to surpass the pre-COVID trendline. Strong relationships and innovative solutions across consumer payments, new flows and value added services are key to Visa's future growth in economies worldwide.
Despite a great deal of uncertainty in the macro climate β from inflation, to the war in Ukraine, to regulatory headwinds and a potential economic downturn β Visa's business model remained resilient. Our three growth levers β consumer payments, new flows and value added services β continue to fuel the company's growth. The opportunity ahead is significant, and our strategy and accomplishments are proving to be effective.
A visionary extraordinaire
This year we lost our founder, Dee Hock, a true individual and visionary. Though not well known outside of payments, Dee's impact and influence are perhaps greater than those of almost any leader in the past half century.
I reached out to Dee in late 2016 after being named CEO of Visa. That call sparked a relationship with our company founder that I treasured. About four years ago, I went to Olympia, Washington and spent half a day with Dee. At that time, approaching his 90th birthday, Dee was sharp, curious, engaging, and demonstrated incredible recall of his time and effort in the founding of Visa. Dee was ahead of his time in his thinking about the business and he had stellar leadership instincts and behaviors. We all stand on his shoulders β all of us who worked with Dee and came after him. May Dee rest in peace.
Consumer payments
More and more consumers prefer digital payments. Consumer preference for digital payments has persisted as the world has recovered from the pandemic. Most consumers report that the way they paid for many goods has permanently switched to digital. The global transition to digital reflects this shift in preference β and expanding access to credentials, increasing acceptance and deepening engagement make up the three main pillars of our consumer payments enablement strategy.
In terms of expanding access to credentials, in FY22, the number of Visa credentials increased 9% year over year and were up 13%, excluding Russia. We also crossed 4.8 billion tokens, security technology that protects sensitive data like credit card numbers, which helps Visa make payments both more secure and more convenient. Visa now has more digital tokens than card credentials β and almost double last year. This marks a huge milestone both for the transition to digital and in our work to secure the wider payments ecosystem.
In the face-to-face environment, consumer focus on safety and convenience is helping to drive preference for touchless commerce and tap to pay. While tap to pay has long been the preferred way to pay in places like Europe and Australia, much of the rest of the world is catching up. Global tap to pay penetration grew 10 points to 54% of face-to-face transactions, excluding Russia, helped by 20 additional countries crossing over the 50% threshold this past year. In Q4, the U.S. reached 28% penetration and saw more than one billion tapped monthly transactions for the first time ever in July, surpassing the UK as the largest country for tap to pay transactions. Visa's network also processed 70% more tap to ride transactions on global transit systems in FY22, surpassing one billion transactions for the first time ever.
In terms of deepening engagement, Visa continues to not only make strategic investments in innovative technology, but also establish new partnerships and strengthen existing relationships. We continue to see mutually beneficial partnerships as key to evolving digital money movement in the future. In the past fiscal year, we signed over 400 commercial partnerships with fintechs globally, from early-stage companies to growing and mature players.
Security is also key to the future of digital money movement. As the lines between our online and in-person lives increasingly blur, fraud is evolving. Cybercriminals are targeting vulnerabilities in both the digital and physical worlds. We continue to monitor new and emerging threats and invest in keeping our ecosystem secure. Over the past five years, Visa has invested over $10 billion in technology, including to reduce fraud and enhance network security. And these efforts have been effective. In 2022 alone, Visa helped prevent an estimated $27 billion in fraud.
New flows
Modern money movement for any payment. While consumer payments have always been core to Visa's business and represent a significant, continued growth lever, the world of money movement is much broader. New flows β our phrase encompassing all money movement beyond consumer to merchant payments β include business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), government-to-consumer (G2C) and peer-to-peer (P2P) among others and represents a significant opportunity for growth. Expanding our penetration of these flows drives additional transactions and volume on the Visa network.
The opportunity in B2B money movement continues to be enormous and our business in the space is significant, with nearly $1.5 trillion in payments volume this past year. Within B2B, our strategy is focused on card-based payments, cross-border payments and accounts receivable and payable payments. In FY22, we continued to expand our client base geographically and in different segments, including fleet, healthcare and travel. For example, we signed a multi-year agreement with WEX to enable their travel, health and corporate clients to make payments using Visa's virtual card capabilities.
This year, Visa Direct, our push payments platform that addresses many of the opportunities in new flows across 60+ use cases, over 2,000 programs, and more than 500 enablers, reached 5.9 billion transactions, excluding Russia. These use cases β like same-day payment for rideshare drivers, faster insurance payouts, remittances, early access to wages and real-time marketplace payouts β have shown ongoing appeal to consumers and businesses. And we continue to add more. For instance, eBay, one of the world's largest third-party marketplaces, enabled faster payouts for its U.S. sellers via Visa Direct.
One of Visa Direct's competitive advantages is its reach. This year, Visa partnered with Singapore-based payments infrastructure platform, Thunes, to expand that reach by enabling money movement to digital wallets. Through this partnership, individuals and small businesses will be able to use Visa Direct to move money internationally to 78 digital wallet providers across 44 countries and territories. This partnership expands Visa Direct's reach to nearly 7 billion endpoints, including more than 3 billion cards, over 2 billion accounts and 1.5 billion digital wallets.
This year, Visa also completed the acquisition of Currencycloud, a global platform that enables banks and fintechs to provide innovative foreign exchange solutions for cross-border payments, transact globally in multiple currencies, embrace digital wallet technology and embed financial tools into their businesses. Currencycloud continued to forge many new partnerships, having signed 135 since December 2021.
Value added services
Enabling secure, reliable and efficient money movement. The challenges and opportunities of the global transition to digital are not evenly distributed. Digital-first companies might come with innovative technological solutions, but without the legacy or scale of their more seasoned competitors. For more mature players, the opportunity to grow into the digital future can be daunting. Visa's value added services (VAS) enable both our traditional clients and new partners to deliver secure, reliable and convenient payments experiences for their customers. For Visa, where new flows means additional volume, VAS means additional yield on that volume.
In FY22, VAS drove $6 billion in revenue, and over half of our clients used five or more value added services for Visa. Our strategy for continued growth is threefold: 1) to deepen penetration of existing products, 2) to grow our suite of value added products and solutions and 3) to expand the geographical footprint of VAS.
Cybersource, our gateway solution for businesses to accept digital payments from all over the world, is a great example of deepening penetration of existing products. As a vital pillar of VAS, Cybersource onboarded its one millionth merchant account earlier this year and continued to expand acquirer relationships, signing notable partnerships like Bank of New Zealand in FY22. In conjunction with Visa, Cybersource also powers dozens of transit projects in cities around the world, from multiple cities in Japan working in partnership with Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company, Limited, to Genoa's Azienda MobilitΓ e Trasporti (AMT) in Italy. We continue to innovate on the acceptance experience and enable access to digital payments for merchants around the globe.
In terms of new products and solutions, this year we completed our acquisition of Tink. Connected with more than 3,400 banks and financial institutions, Tink is an open banking platform that enables financial institutions, fintechs and merchants to move money and build financial products and services. These services give consumers more control over their financial experiences, from enabling account-to-account open banking powered payments to helping people manage their money and set financial goals. Just this year, Tink signed up marquee partners for open banking powered payments including the global payments platform Adyen and Revolut, the global financial super app with more than 20 million customers.
We have also made significant inroads expanding the VAS footprint geographically, bringing VAS to more clients across the globe. For instance, across Europe, clients enrolling in Visa Advanced Authorization and Visa Risk Manager β two products that, together, give issuers both real-time risk scores to better inform authorization decisions and tools for managing risk β tripled over the past three years and these clients span 14 countries. Services like these, along with our full suite of risk and identity solutions, are just a few of the ways being part of the Visa network helps protect financial institutions and merchants from fraud. We'll continue innovating in this area to solve present and emerging payment security challenges.
Sustainable digital commerce and inclusive economic growth
At Visa, our corporate purpose is to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid. It is our north star in terms of who we strive to be and why each of our employees comes to work every day. To deliver on that purpose, we work to ensure that the growth of the digital economy enables individuals, businesses and economies to thrive in an inclusive and sustainable way. I see this playing out internally in our company, in the communities we serve and more broadly in the industry.
Core to our purpose to uplift everyone, everywhere is our longstanding commitment to process all legal transactions. Respect for the law creates an objective, transparent and reliable standard of enforcement that is considerate of the diverse range of communities and economies we serve. Within Visa, we continued to make progress on our commitment to increase the number of underrepresented employees in our workforce in the United States by 50% by 2025 and increase the number of underrepresented leaders (Vice Presidents and above) by 50% by 2023. This year, we also welcomed 75 students into the second class of the Visa Black Scholars and Jobs Program, a scholarship and mentorship program that, upon successful completion, offers graduates a career opportunity at Visa. Currently, we support 126 students, across two classes, from 29 states and the District of Columbia, attending 74 different universities. For us, it has been a fantastic opportunity to invest in future business leaders and in the inclusion and diversity of our company.
In our communities, we've made great progress on our goal to digitally enable 50 million small and micro businesses (SMBs) by the end of 2023, now standing at just over 40 million at the end of FY22. We expanded Visa Practical Business Skills β our educational portal for small business owners β and continued to support key partnerships and initiatives, including Inclusive Fintech 50, a global innovation competition for fintechs with the potential to improve financial inclusion; the Visa Everywhere Initiative, a global startup pitch competition judged by Visa executives, clients and partners that, since its launch in 2015, has helped startups in more than 100 countries, collectively raise more than $16 billion in funding; and She's Next, a grant, mentorship and networking program supporting women entrepreneurs. In addition, the Visa Foundation committed $15.5 million in grant funding and $35.5 million in impact investments to support gender diverse and inclusive small businesses globally.
We continued to make progress toward our corporate climate-focused goals, including maintaining carbon neutral operations, and achieving net zero emissions by 2040, with an aspiration to become a climate-positive company. We continue to support broader sustainability efforts beyond our operational footprint by rolling out products and services and forging partnerships that make it easier for consumers and businesses to embed sustainable habits in their everyday lives. And we are committed to working with governments around the world to deliver the benefits of electronic payments and drive inclusive economic growth.
Dear Shareholders, A network built for the future
In closing, FY22 was a year of transition β and a year of many challenges. But it was also a year of growth and innovation in payments. We continued to grow our network and power global commerce, seeing an average of 707 million transactions per day on Visa's network. Compared to our pre-pandemic numbers, the growth in our network is remarkable. Merchant locations accepting Visa increased from more than 61 million in 2019 to more than 80 million, plus an estimated 20 million locations through payment facilitators, in 2022. Our card credentials increased from 3.4 billion to 4.1 billion over the same time period, laying the foundation for continued growth in years to come.
It goes without saying that Visa's success as a company and growth as a network is largely thanks to the tireless efforts of the 26,500 individuals who bring our network to life each and every day β individuals I am proud to call my colleagues. The past few years have brought with them extraordinary challenges and I'm constantly inspired by the determination, resilience and ingenuity of our people in overcoming them.
I'd also like to acknowledge changes to the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors. This year, we welcomed a new Global Chief Marketing Officer, Frank Cooper III, whose broad perspective and purpose-driven leadership will be great assets for our organization and ongoing brand evolution. At the board level, we welcomed two new independent directors, Teri L. List and Kermit R. Crawford, who each bring with them many years of senior leadership experience across industries, which will be invaluable to Visa. On behalf of the board, I'd also like to offer thanks to Mary Cranston and Bob Matschullat, who contributed 15 years of distinguished service, including as committee chairs and Bob as our former Chairman of the Board, who will both be retiring at this year's Annual Meeting.
Finally, as we have recently announced, I am pleased to share that Ryan McInerney will be Visa's next Chief Executive Officer. This leadership change reflects the Board's thoughtful and well-established approach to succession. Ryan is a very seasoned leader in the payments and consumer banking industry. In his role as President over the past 10 years, Ryan has been responsible for Visa's global businesses, delivering value to the company's clients and partners in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. I look forward to continuing to drive Visa's success, growth and innovation in my role as CEO until February 1, 2023. At that time, I will assume the role of Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, where I will continue to partner closely with Ryan to deliver on Visa's growth strategy.
Looking ahead, I am confident in the strength and resilience of Visa's business, even as we face significant uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment. While we may be entering a challenging economic cycle in FY23, we believe that many of the tailwinds in digital payments will persist. We expect cash digitization to continue, ecommerce habits formed during the pandemic to endure and innovation in payments to evolve. We recognize the economic realities around the world and will continue to track them closely, striking the right balance between prudence and additional investment in the many attractive growth opportunities we see for Visa in the medium to long term. We will keep building new partnerships, investing in technology and security and creating new payment experiences. And in the months and years to come, we will continue to power the digital transformation β to fulfill our purpose, grow our ecosystem, give more people access to the digital financial system and drive returns for shareholders.
Alfred F. Kelly, Jr.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Read the original letter here.
