Q&A: Once and Future Visa CEOs Talk Competition, Regulation and Leadership

Visa's (NYSE: V) outgoing chief executive sounds pretty happy about his retirement — as long as his successor keeps the share price up.

"I worry about competition, I worry about regulation, I worry about the customers we have and what we need to do to keep them engaged. … but now I don't have to worry about it anymore!" Joseph Saunders exulted in an interview on Wednesday.

He then teased his replacement, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) executive Charles Scharf, who will officially take over the world's largest payments company next week: "I mean, I will worry about it since I own Visa stock, so I'm very concerned that he does a good job. And I'm sure he will."

Saunders led Visa through its initial public offering in 2008 and helped it emerge relatively unscathed from the financial crisis. But he leaves Scharf a company facing mounting competition from several industries, increasingly tight regulation at home and abroad and a rapidly changing technological landscape.

Visa is resigned to the recent U.S. regulatory changes, if not happy about them — "it is what it is," Saunders told American Banker on Wednesday. In a joint interview, he and Scharf also discussed the other challenges facing the company and Visa's future strategy. A week after Citigroup (NYSE:C) abruptly replaced its CEO overnight, Saunders also weighed in on the "continuity of leadership," and why he decided to step down now. Following are excerpts from the joint interview:

Why did you decide to retire now and how did Visa settle on this timing to announce a new CEO?
Joseph Saunders: Our succession planning process has been pretty robust and detailed. I signed a contract a while ago that said I was going to be done on March 31, 2013, and when you're doing that you can't just go out and hire somebody and say, "Come in on March 12," and I'll have a couple of hours of conversation with them and just fade into the sunset. We always knew that there was going to be a transitional period. … Once you find the right person and they're available, it's wise to get them on board sooner rather than later.

Our year ends in September, so on November 1 we will be a month into our 2013, and I think the continuity of having someone run the company that will be here for most of the year is extraordinarily important. That influenced the timing.

As it relates to me, I just decided two and half years ago that I'd be a few months away from my 68th birthday and that I had other things on my personal agenda that I wanted to do. I wasn't ever going to be here for another three or four years, that just isn't who I am or what I wanted to be. With everything that's going on at Visa, with all the change that's going on around us, I think that continuity of leadership is important. I am just extraordinarily happy that we got the right person, that [he was] available now and that Visa can move along without a hitch.

What was the process of identifying Charlie as the right person?
Saunders: We looked at quite a few people on the outside, and there was a serious effort to decide whether we had an internal candidate that could run the company. And through a very lengthy and logical process Charlie emerged as the person that the entire board, including myself, felt was the right individual.