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 $211 billion in 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 Eraña, president of Visa’s Latin America and Caribbean region, said in a March 14 news release.
Visa is providing consumers, businesses and governments with secure and fast processing while at the same time “fueling the Latin American and Caribbean economy,” Eraña added.
The Latin America and the Caribbean region have been an area of focus for most card networks, Gwenn Bézard, cofounder and research director at Boston-based Aite Group LLC, tells PaymentsSource. And 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,” he adds.
Moreover, many countries in the region, such as Brazil, have done reasonably well during the recession, Bézard says. Brazil has several programs, such as the use of prepaid cards for government benefits, that promote card use, he notes.
Brazil recorded Visa’s highest regional payments-volume growth last year at 24.6%, while Mexico recorded 16.8% growth. The rest of the region collectively reported 22.8% volume growth, according to Visa.
Visa has been targeting affluent consumers in the region, promoting primarily its Gold, Signature, Platinum and Infinite cards. For the year, Visa processed 6.5 million payment transactions in the region, up 18.2% from 5.5 million in 2009.
