(30 July 2010−Global)Visa has reported a 2 percent drop in the card giant’s third-quarter profit, despite a 23 percent jump in revenue.Optimistic consumers fuelled the surge as Visa recorded higher volumes of processed transactions as well as increased consumer spending.
Despite the small drop in profit, the results signal rising optimism amongst consumers and has renewed hopes that the focus will now move away from consumer defaults to the growth of card loans.
Visa’s performance has been fuelled by continued improvements in global cross-border and payments-volume growth, said the group’s chairman and chief executive Joseph Saunders.
Visa reported, for the quarter ended June 30th, that profit fell 1.8 percent to US$716 million (A$801 million) from US$729 million a year earlier.
Revenue for the fiscal third-quarter jumped to US$2 billion.
Payments volume rose 14 percent from a year ago to US$803 billion, representing spending on Visa-branded cards.
The total number of transactions processed in the third quarter rose 14 percent to 11.7 billion.