Visa Inc.'s continued push to promote its card products in Latin America and the Caribbean region helped produce considerable growth for the company, as sales volume rose 28%, to $270 billion from 2009, according to the card brand.
"The performance is the outcome of [our] global strategy to mitigate cash transactions to our global processing network," Eduardo Erana, president of Visa's Latin America and Caribbean region, said in a press release Monday.
Visa is providing consumers, businesses and governments with secure and fast processing while at the same time "fueling the Latin American and Caribbean economy," Erana said.
Most card networks have paid a lot of attention to Latin America and the Caribbean region, said Gwenn Bezard, co-founder and research director at Aite Group LLC of Boston.
Visa is especially "putting focus on this area because the Visa brand is not in Europe, as Visa Europe is a separate company from Visa," Bezard said in an interview.
Moreover, many countries in the region, such as Brazil, have done reasonably well during the recession, Bezard said. Brazil has several programs, such as the use of prepaid cards for government benefits, that promote card use, he said.
