The FINANCIAL -- Visa Inc. (NYSE: V), a global payments technology company, on November 16 announced the opening of a new global data processing center in North America.

Concurrently, Visa implemented several IT enhancements, chief among them the implementation of a new operating system that underpins VisaNet, its global transaction processing network. 

Together, these technology investments further enhance the flexibility, reliability and scale of VisaNet, and increase Visa's ability to process the ever-growing number of increasingly complex electronic payments around the world, which now account for 33 percent of global consumer spending. [1]

Greater reliability, capacity - The opening of the new center is a key milestone in Visa's multi-year technology upgrade, that results in Visa now having two synchronized, secure and reliable data centers in North America, each capable of carrying Visa's entire global payments volume in the event of a natural disaster or systems outage.  Instant fail-over technology between Visa data centers around the globe ensures the 5-nine level of uninterrupted service that cardholders, merchants, governments and financial institutions have come to expect from Visa. 

New operating system - Developed in partnership with IBM, the system, known as zTM Transaction Processing Facility (z/TPF), is a 64-bit operating system that allows more information to be manipulated at once and perform more complex processing functions in milliseconds. Importantly, this paves the way for Visa to deliver new, information-intensive applications such as advanced fraud analysis, and mobile payments and services.

Enhanced security - This centralized processing structure, combined with the new operating system,  provides Visa with a comprehensive view into the global payment system, leading to high levels of intelligence around spending patterns, enabling Visa to provide a broad range of information-based services, and improving the company's ability to detect and prevent fraud in near real-time.
 

"Visa's commitment to continuous technology upgrades differentiates us from competitors and helps Visa play a key role in facilitating the migration to electronic payments.  Few people recognize the critical role VisaNet plays in supporting our extensive brand acceptance, securing our products and facilitating payment innovation," said Mike Dreyer, Chief Information Officer, Visa Inc.  "As we activate our second new data center in four years and complete a transition to the latest information technology, we are laying the foundation for the future of Visa payments and related services."

Data Center Expands Global Capacity, Flexibility

Located in the Eastern United States, Visa's new data center is a 370,000 square foot, state-of-art facility architected to support multiple authorization engines and process hundreds of millions of transactions each day. With more than 140,000 square feet of raised floor space the center houses some of the payments industry's most advanced payment processing services and is capable of handling more than 10,000 transaction messages per second.

Visa's new processing center completes a global network of four data centers on three continents connecting more than 16,000 financial institutions, and millions of merchants and processing partners through more than 1,600 network endpoints around the world. For the four quarters ended June 30, 2009, Visa's total volume was nearly $4.3 trillion dollars. With the growing worldwide migration away from cash and checks and towards electronic payments being fueled by new merchant acceptance locations, new products like mobile payments and prepaid, and new services like money transfer, and mobile alerts and notifications, the volume and complexity of Visa transactions are expected to grow. 

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