Visa Payments Volume in Q3 136% Above Pre-Pandemic Levels

Get up and go — consumers are doing so in droves and using their cards to pay for it all.

Visa’s results posted on Tuesday (July 26) spotlight a boost over pre-pandemic spending levels in key categories — perhaps most notably in travel and entertainment, and even corporate travel is seeing an uptick.

The company said that overall payments volume was up 8% in nominal terms to $2.9 trillion. Credit volume was up 16% in nominal terms to $1.5 trillion, and debit gained 1% to $1.4 trillion.

Supplemental materials released by the company in tandem with earnings show that, in terms of cross-border transactions, cross-border volumes soared by 28%. Total cards in force gained 8% to 3.6 billion, as credit cards increased by 5% and debit gained 9% to 2.5 billion cards.

CEO Al Kelly said during the conference call with analysts that total third quarter payments volumes were 136% over levels seen three years ago.

“Card present, excluding travel volumes in the U.S. remained significantly ahead of pre-pandemic levels at 170% of 2019,” Kelly said. Processed transactions were 139% versus the same quarter seen in 2019.

Stable or Improving Growth  

“Growth has been stable or improving in overall domestic payment, volume credit debit card, present card, not present volumes. And this has been the case for most of 2022,” Kelly remarked.

Drilling down a bit, home improvement and retail good spending during the third quarter grew by low single digits year over year, but still remain well ahead of pre-COVID levels.

Affluent consumers continue to spend money at restaurants and travel, and non-affluent spend was resilient, said Kelly.

“We haven’t seen any evidence of consumer pull, pulling back spending in our markets,” said Kelly, despite inflation. He added that eCommerce volumes were 300% above 2019’s third quarter and Visa Direct volumes gained 35% year on year.

See also: Visa Reports ‘Very Strong’ Payments and Cross-Border Volume in Q3

In discussion of Visa Direct, and in tandem with the recent announcements that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is investigating fraud in peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions, Kelly noted that Visa Direct “isn’t running on a different or new platform. It runs on VisaNet and therefore has the same capabilities that we have on VisaNet, including those related to KYC and related to fraud prevention.”

Drilling down a bit, the company saw 20% revenue growth in B2B, and commercial payments volumes were 145% of the third quarter of 2019, up 27% year over year, and where six points of growth came from a travel rebound.

Chief Financial Officer Vasant Prabhu said that excluding transactions within Europe, cross-border transactions as measured via an index jumped from 94 in March to 112 in June.

“This was held by much of Asia opening up at the beginning of the quarter, the U.S. inbound corridor picking up steam as well as strong growth in and out of Europe,” he said. Later in the call, management said the travel demand has been pent up and will stay strong for quite some time.

As Kelly told analysts on the call, “We’ve benefited from the acceleration and the digitization that has happened during the pandemic — and we’ve added an emphasis on new flows.”