Viewpoints

Visa’s Blog – Visa Viewpoints

PERSPECTIVES ON DIGITAL CURRENCY

Jul 14, 2010

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FIFA World Cup™ Provides Strong Kick to South Africa Tourism Revenues

While Spain celebrated their first ever FIFA World Cup™ championship on Sunday, host country South Africa was also celebrating the end of a successful tournament that saw hundreds of thousands of soccer fans descend upon the country. While blasting their vuvuzelas and celebrating their countries’ involvement in the FIFA World Cup™, international visitors have used their Visa cards to make a significant contribution to South Africa’s tourism revenues leading up to and during the month-long tournament.

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Posted by: Paul Wilke, Visa Corporate Relations on July 14, 2010 at 3:23 pm

Category: Brand & Sponsorships, Cross Border
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Jul 13, 2010

Utilities Seeing Benefits of Card Acceptance

Today, PaymentsSource reported that online bill payment continues to grow faster than all other consumer payment methods. Visa has recognized this trend for many years and has actively worked with billers across many industries, including utilities, to expand and facilitate card acceptance to benefit utilities and cardholders alike.

Our work is paying off, as thousands of utilities around the U.S. currently accept Visa for bill payment, and Chartwell reported that card acceptance by utilities increased significantly during the past decade (Chartwell report).

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Posted by: Ted Carr, Visa Corporate Relations on July 13, 2010 at 6:22 pm

Category: Benefits of Digital Currency
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Jul 8, 2010

Migration Watch: Newspaper Vending Machines Shift to Plastic

When is the last time you happened to have eight quarters in your pocket? It’s probably been a while – like when you carried your tooth fairy money around for a rainy day or when you knew you were heading to a Laundromat that only accepted quarters. Well, this is the exact point made by the VP for circulation at The Wall Street Journal when asked about the company’s recent decision to add payment card readers to 190 newspaper vending machines in the New York area. See the full story here.

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Posted by: Liz Nunan, Visa Corporate Relations on July 8, 2010 at 8:07 am

Category: Benefits of Digital Currency
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Jul 1, 2010

Money Transfer Update: Interview with Kelly Alpert

Is Money Transfer at a tipping point? Analysts from the Aite Group think so, and we agree. A recently published report suggests that despite the challenges of the recent recession, the money transfer market is growing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, reaching US$412 billion by 2011, up from US$394 billion in 2010. We’ve seen a huge amount of progress in this space just in the past year and in fact, have just made some exciting announcements from a Visa perspective in the past few weeks.

Watch the video to hear about the news straight from Kelly Alpert, our resident expert in money transfer.

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Posted by: Elvira Swanson, Visa Corporate Relations on July 1, 2010 at 5:35 pm

Category: Products & Services
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Jun 30, 2010

USA Today: “Credit and Debit Card Revolution Is Spreading Across Asia”

No doubt about it. We read Kathy Chu’s piece in this morning’s USA Today entitled “Asia-Pacific region embraces use of credit and debit cards” and knew we couldn’t have said it better ourselves. (Side note: while our very own Elizabeth Buse did say it herself when she was interviewed for the story and quoted throughout – the strength of this trend was highlighted by the chorus of industry backers, from the well-respected industry analyst David Robertson to even our competitors, concurring on the vast potential of the digital currency in Asia.)

Before you read any further, watch this video for Visa’s unvarnished take on where we’re headed in Asia and why the potential is so vast. Gordon Cooper, our Regional Head of Mobile Payment in Asia-Pacific, paints a pretty compelling picture. And Elizabeth Buse echoes his sentiment in USA Today; simply put: “’If you look out over the horizon in Asia, at what’s going to drive growth, it’s mobile technology,’ predicts Visa’s Buse.”

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Posted by: Will Valentine, Visa Corporate Relations on June 30, 2010 at 5:30 pm

Category: About Visa, Cross Border, Mobile
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Jun 28, 2010

Using the FIFA World Cup™ to improve financial literacy

Trying to teach high school students about personal finance is not always an easy sell. Just ask Chauncey Veatch, an elementary school teacher in Mecca, CA with an incredible commitment to teaching his students about financial literacy and other life skills they can take beyond the classroom. But learning about money management is a crucial life skill and so to combat the inevitable classroom yawns, we decided to make financial literacy fun.

Using Visa’s sponsorship of FIFA and the World Cup as a starting point, we built Financial Soccer, an educational video game that tests players’ financial know-how as they answer multiple-choice questions and try to score goals.

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Posted by: Jason Alderman, Visa Corporate Relations on June 28, 2010 at 10:47 am

Category: Brand & Sponsorships, Corporate Responsibility, Financial Literacy
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Jun 24, 2010

More People Go … with Social Media During FIFA World Cup

Less than two weeks into the FIFA World Cup, it appears that the social media expectations referenced in Andrew Woodward’s last post are already being realized. In the first week of the tournament alone, FIFA, marketers and broadcasters experienced extraordinary online activity around the tournament. On June 15, FIFA tallied a record-breaking 10 million visitors to its official Web site in one day, while FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter’s Twitter handle, @seppblatter, rapidly gained a following with a recent vuvuzuela tweet attracting followers at a rate of 9 per second.  TIME Magazine has credited social media for World Cup television ratings that are not only unusually high for the World Cup, but unusually high for sports broadcasts, period – including the first six games of the NBA Finals – pointing to the medium’s ability to distribute soccer-related content faster and farther than traditional media.

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Posted by: Antonio Lucio, Chief Marketing Officer on June 24, 2010 at 9:52 am

Category: Brand & Sponsorships
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Jun 23, 2010

Boosting South Africa’s spirit and economy

From the sound of the vuvuzelas to the action on the field, South Africa has managed to capture the spirit of sports fans this month. Since June 11, hundreds and thousands of passionate soccer fans from around the world have converged on South Africa to take part in the excitement and festivities of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™.  As they have celebrated and cheered on their teams, these fans have also made a significant contribution to South Africa’s tourism revenues.

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Posted by: Paul Wilke, Visa Corporate Relations on June 23, 2010 at 3:44 pm

Category: Brand & Sponsorships, Cross Border
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Jun 22, 2010

Currency of Progress: Greetings from Nashville

The rolling hills and rich farmland around Nashville, Tennessee are an appropriate location for the headquarters of Tractor Supply Company that, in the words of Brian Evans, “caters to people who like to get their hands dirty.” Brian is the company’s director of HR and an articulate advocate of Visa’s prepaid payroll product issued by Citi since 2007. The Currency of Progress team visited Brian and his team in Nashville to capture the latest video vignette. We were, dare I say it, inspired and a little humbled by stories told by payroll cardholders Linda Bennett and Cat Kitzmiller. While neither of them have bank accounts they both enjoy all the benefits of being a Visa cardholder, including online bill payment, acceptance at millions of merchants and ATM access. It’s all too easy to take these benefits for granted when you’ve had a Visa card all your adult life. As with other Currency “heroes”, Linda and Cat are not nearly as glib and nonchalant. They are honest and direct about why they prefer their card over the alternative. In Linda and Cat’s case, this means no exorbitant check-cashing fees and a greater sense of freedom and inclusion.

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Posted by: Richard Martin, Visa Corporate Relations on June 22, 2010 at 5:17 pm

Category: Benefits of Digital Currency, Currency of Progress
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Jun 18, 2010

A Few Thoughts About Australia

The word “Australia” is often invoked during the current U.S. interchange debate, and with good reason.  With a large economy and a sophisticated payment industry, it illustrates the potential unintended consequences of the price controls proposed by the Durbin Amendment.

About 6 months ago (late November), the New York Times actually did an in-depth review of the  impact of credit card regulation and price controls in Australia titled “U.S. Looks to Australia on Credit Card Fees” (although we here at Visa were admittedly partial to the story’s original headline online “Australian Credit Card Fee Curbs Backfired” featured in the graphic below).

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Posted by: Will Valentine, Visa Corporate Relations on June 18, 2010 at 1:07 pm

Category: Government Regulatory Issues & Interchange
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