Visa Europe Revenue Up 25 Percent To All-Time High

Visa Europe, the payments giant merging with its former parent company, Visa Inc., said early Tuesday (Jan. 26) that it had its most successful year ever in terms of revenue growth, as the top line grew by 25 percent to €2.31 billion for the year that ended in June 2015.

The company said it has scale enough now that its business accounts for €1 in every €5.70 spent in Europe.

[bctt tweet=”Visa Europe said it accounts for €1 in every €5.70 spent in Europe.”]

Turning to contactless payments, 2015 marked the year that saw that business breach the billion transactions per year mark, and, in fact, at 1.7 billion transactions, the data shows this payment method makes up as much as one in seven of those transactions deemed face-to-face, which far outpaced the one in 25 ratio seen last year.

The total number of cards issued, the company said, stands at 522 million, which translates to more than one Visa card issued per adult.

Point-of-sale spending, the company said, was up 7.7 percent through the year, to €1.58 trillion. In a statement that accompanied the release of the company’s annual report, Visa Europe Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Nicolas Huss said that the company put up the high growth numbers “while maintaining always-on delivery with 100 percent availability of our systems for more than 100 months in a row and maintaining trust in the system by keeping fraud at record low levels of less than 5c for every €100 spent.”

As has been widely reported, Visa Europe and Visa Inc. said in November that Visa will acquire Visa Europe in an effort to boost scale in the region, and the deal is slated to close in the June quarter of this year, the companies said.