Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) Wolfe FinTech Forum March 15, 2023 9:20 AM ET
Company Participants
Vasant Prabhu – Vice Chairman and CFO
Conference Call Participants
Darrin Peller – Analyst
Darrin Peller
Hey, guys, thank you again for joining us again. I’m Darrin Peller covering FinTech and payments at Wolf Research. Joining us for day 2 of the Wolfe FinTech Forum. We’re really happy to have Visa, which is our topic. As many of you guys know, it’s been our topic now for some time. With us, we have the CFO, Vasant Prabhu with us. We’ve had many, many times with us through the years for meetings. And he’s always been great to have. So first of all, thanks for joining Vasant.
Vasant Prabhu
Thank you.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q – Darrin Peller
Before we jump in, I guess on any of the Visa specific trends and details you’re seeing, I can’t hurt to just start with what you’re seeing in the market, given all the banking, volatility and the closures of some pretty important banks last few days. So if you could start off with a sense of what you’re seeing, has the Visa network been able to operate fluidly? Is there anything any friction happening or any problems?
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, I think where the speaking from the standpoint of the payments, network, things have been completely normal. Debit and credit credentials have been usable, without any disruptions whatsoever. They’re settling every night. So really no, no impact whatsoever.
Darrin Peller
Okay.
Vasant Prabhu
And, you know…
Darrin Peller
Even over the week-end and over it was, I mean, it settles usually on Sunday.
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, no, in fact, there’s been absolutely no, for.
Darrin Peller
No friction.
Vasant Prabhu
No friction whatsoever.
Darrin Peller
Good. Good. Well, I guess that’s good. I mean, frankly, as a reminder, Visa is there to step in if there were a problem. That’s part of the year, the value proposition, right.
Vasant Prabhu
Yes. I mean, we do have the backstop. And, we always keep large amounts of cash and the cash has always been, there was never, ever, ever any, any, any concern backfront.
Darrin Peller
Let’s just take it a step back then. I mean, it is a quick review, you guys put out a lot of data. So overall volume transaction levels from your most recent update through, I think it was through January, late, most recently.
Vasant Prabhu
Through February
Darrin Peller
Through February, I’m sorry. We’ve seen resilience, obviously, throughout the data. In fact, I think February came in better than a lot of people expected. And it’s been pretty notable around consumer spending, especially cross border trends, economy as well. I mean, the resilience of e-com has been pretty interesting. And making folks think it’s probably structural. And I’m here to say, I mean, maybe just take a step back and remind us that some of the trends you’re seeing.
Vasant Prabhu
Sure. Yes, I think as you said if you sort of shut yourself on, I like to say if you shut yourself up in a room, and all you did was look at our numbers, which is really what we tried to do. We try not to be influenced by the opinions, you hear people, express, starting all the way back to January of 2022, the business has been remarkably stable, right? It’s been 43% to 45% 46%, ahead of 2019, almost on a day by day, week by week basis.
And as you saw in February, once again, we had double digit growth in the U.S. e-commerce growing strongly, card present growing strongly, debit growing strongly, almost everything was at or about double digit, so close to cross border. It’s hard always to predict how cross border is going to recover. It did recover, at roughly the pace we had expected in our first fiscal quarter, which was the last calendar quarter. And then you’ve seen the recovery continue in the February numbers. I think, we got to an index of about 131, on travel, which by the way, now is a four year comparison.
So you have to make some adjustments. But even if you look at on a three year basis, which is still comfortable to 2020, because COVID really started hitting in March now the comparability to 20 will end. It was still a nice recovery. And then cross border, ecommerce, as you saw was 180 index, which is very, very strong.
So bottom line, I mean, really no change in trend to the end of through the end of February. Consumers are changing what they’re doing within all that, as you know going from products to services, and more travel and entertainment and so on. And they’re adjusting to inflation, but the aggregate level of spend, which is really what we see, has been amazingly stable.
Darrin Peller
On that note, I mean, the behavior of the consumer, you haven’t seen much shift in terms of, I mean, you’ve seen again, more spending on travel more on services. That’s been the case now, though, for…
Vasant Prabhu
Absolutely and it continues, right. And we get this question a lot. And if you dig into the numbers, what you find is very intuitive. What’s its intuitive in the sense that people sat at home in 2021, and bought a lot of stuff. Now they’ve bought a lot of stuff, a lot of Home Improvement things, lots of clothes, etcetera. Now, they’re spending their money on other things that they couldn’t do in 2021 and only parts of 2022. So what’s driving the business is travel is very robust still.
Entertainment is also extremely robust restaurants have recovered quite well. Services in general doing well. But that doesn’t mean products are doing badly. If you just look at the — we’ve been saying through this whole thing, because we focused on 2019, as the benchmark. So it allowed prevented us from becoming, I say manic depressive, right? Like somehow we were geniuses in 2021. And now we’re not, because the goods business, if you compare it to 2019, is doing just fine. It’s doing as well as it would have done had COVID not existed, the index to 2019 is not bad at all. It’s just that there was a big jump in 2021. And compared to 2021, it doesn’t look so great.
Darrin Peller
Right.
Vasant Prabhu
So if you’re planning your business, like 2021 was the future, you’re in trouble. But if you’re looking at 2019, you’d say this is fine. I would take these numbers and travel hasn’t fully recovered yet to where it would have been pre-COVID. Even entertainment is now the restaurants are mostly back. So all-in-all consumers have just adjusted and adjusting to inflation. They’re shifting some behaviors, but they’re holding their aggregate spending.
Darrin Peller
In terms of behavior another thing we’ve seen is obviously card-not-present staying at a higher percentage of the mix than it was pre-COVID. Right? It jumped a lot during COVID. But it kind of stayed at that level, even as folks are going back to brick and mortar. So is that something structural in your view?
Vasant Prabhu
I totally think it’s structural. I mean, think about your own habits, right. I mean, going into the pandemic, they were many fewer people buying groceries online, I think there’s more people now buying groceries online as a habit. And that stuck. Going into the pandemic, there were fewer people doing restaurant buying online. That’s become also a habit. So there’s a variety of behaviors that have become — we’ve just gotten more comfortable doing things online. And those behaviors are definitely sticking right.
Now, there’s also the back to work thing is now different. Not everybody, very few companies are back to work five days a week. So some of the card present stuff may not come back in the long run. I mean, there’s some research that says that fuel purchases are being impacted by the fact that commuting has structurally gone down for the time being, will it come back? I don’t know. So behaviors have changed?
Darrin Peller
Yes. When we think about the economics of the economic impact, your model of the behavioral changes, for example, is card now present generating better yields? Is it doesn’t matter? Or is it more or less a wash?
Vasant Prabhu
No card-not-present is very good for us, right? Because we’ve said before many times that our share of a card-not-present transaction is higher than it is of a card present transaction. And yield wise, they’re roughly similar. I’ve always been for us. But card-not-present is in fact, I mean, we are the enablers of digital commerce. So card-not-present is inherently a better thing for us, because we do a better job than other forms of payment when you’re doing e-commerce.
Darrin Peller
And there’s more services attached to it.
Vasant Prabhu
There’s more services. Fraud for example, is far more important in the e-commerce space. And we’re very good at that. Reliability is very, very important. We’re very good at that. So all the things we do well and dispute resolution is very important. Online, and so it helps.
Darrin Peller
About travel. You were at 132% and 18 [Ph] levels in terms of X intra Europe cross border travel around that layer that range recently. And I mean, are you seeing any impact from some of the reopening we’re still seeing in Asia and China specifically yet? Or what’s the progress been like?
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, absolutely. I mean, we said that travel, cross border travel was an element of the recovery this year that there was still more recovery left in cross border travel. And we’re seeing that. So if you look at it, Asia was a laggard. And Asia has been recovering very nicely. And I would expect by the end of the — this quarter, Asia may be back to 2019 levels, with the relevant factors, it’s only back to 2019 levels. So there’s still more to go. The other one that was a laggard was inbound to the U.S. And that’s picking up but slowly. I would hope that by the end of this quarter, that would also be back to 2019 levels.
On the other hand, inbound to Europe has been booming, beneficiary of the strong dollar. Inbound to Latin America has been booming, mostly because Latin America stayed open through most of the pandemic. Travel out of Asia is going to be a big driver of growth for a while and into Asia too. As far as China goes, I think we told you to be cautious about how fast it will recover. And we’ve been right so far. I think what people don’t recognize is that there was a massive reduction in airline capacity. Through COVID going in and out of China. And it’s coming back only slowly. You had to have to get landing slots.
So outbound Chinese travel to the U.S. and Europe will be slow. There are some countries that have really made it easy for Chinese travelers like Thailand, you can get a visa on the ground there you don’t have to get it ahead of time. There’s more flight capacity that’s come back faster, right. And so the beneficiaries right now are going to be more within Asia, probably for the time being maybe to the Middle East. Over time, it will build to the U.S. and Europe. There’s a lot of internal Chinese travel also going on. I mean initially it’s easier to travel within China, because the airline capacity has come back faster.
So there were initially some testing requirements. I think most of those are gone now. So I think we’ll start to see that more significantly, as we get into the latter part of this year. But as you as we said, we need the cross border business to recover. And the China component is a big, big part of that.
Darrin Peller
Yes, I mean, I think as a reminder, you talked about that? Well, the way we understood it, it was probably in the high single digit percentage of X intra Europe, business pre-COVID. Is that about right?
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, I mean, we don’t — we don’t really want to get into all that, other than to say that if the cross border business is going to recover to pre-COVID levels, recovery in Asia, and recovery from China is an important component of it. And that’s the next leg of the recovery. Asia is just getting to 100%. And there’s no reason why it won’t get back to where it used to be before. And frankly the cross border business if rates for hotels and airlines stay where they are, because transactions are lagging even the volumes you see, right. So there’s more recovery to come and transactions and actual trips. So you could see us go past the pre-COVID trendline at some point because rates are higher, but will they stick at higher levels? We’ll have to wait and see.
Darrin Peller
I mean, to your point, even the pre-COVID trend line, if I remember correctly, was cross border tended to grow at around 10%, 9%, 10% per year, right?
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, travel was growing a little slower than that. e-commerce is growing faster. So yes, it was in that range.
Darrin Peller
But that would still extrapolate CAGR wise to over 140%. Now, if nothing ever happened with a pandemic.
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, there’s more to come. And another component that’s been very healthy is cross border, e-commerce. I think another new behavior through the pandemic, is the idea that if I’m buying online, I am not that sensitive to where the product comes from. So cross border e-commerce has really picked up a lot of global suppliers have learned that cross border e-commerce is a good source of business. So I expect cross border e-commerce to be another component. Remember 10 years ago, cross border was mostly about travel. Today, cross border is meaningfully also got e-commerce in it.
Darrin Peller
Shifting gears a little bit, your growth rate has been very strong for many, many years. And you’ve become a much bigger company. Yet despite that the mix you’re getting from some of the new value added services that gets 20% of your revenues now, and some of the new flows opportunities that you’ve invested in your business to allow for, we’ve estimated could allow for maybe some acceleration structurally in the business over time, despite a larger base. I mean, what are your thoughts?
Vasant Prabhu
That’s our view, too. So our core business is consumer payments, right. And I still believe there’s a very strong runway there. They’re still, the pandemic has been wonderful for digitization of cash around the world, more people have digital credentials to pay, infrastructures have gotten better. So I remain extremely confident that the consumer payments business has a very long runway and very healthy growth.
But then think of it as we have two more vectors of growth we’ve added on in the last eight years. One is a vector that increases our volume, because our network has become so much more capable of doing things. We’ve added a vast number of use cases in what we call our new flows business, that have huge total available markets that we never used to serve before, right cross border remittances, etcetera, etcetera. So that’s a source of volume growth on top of consumer payments that we never had before.
And then the other vector of growth is value added services. So think of it as if I get a transaction, the more value I can add to the transaction. The more yield I get on it. So we’ve got two new vectors of growth, one that drives volume over and above consumer payments and other that drives value over and above the transaction. And they are growing much faster than consumer payments today. You saw our growth has been 20% in the last few quarters.
So yes, I mean, as they become a larger component of the mix, and they grow faster than consumer payments, structurally, the growth rate goes up.
Darrin Peller
Right. Just holding it a little bit more on value were added services. Again, that’s 20% of your revenue. Now, that’s gone up quite pretty quickly. Talk about the go to market on that talk about if you don’t mind reminding the audience of what those are right, the mix of them and why they’re growing so well.
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, we have, we categorize them into four categories. There are solutions we have for issuers, in that would be issuer processing, for example, in that would be, a variety of services that are related to Visa account updater, where you don’t have to change your card number when you get a new card, etcetera, etcetera. So there’s a range of services for issuers, there’s a range of services for acquirers and merchants. CyberSource is one of them. We also have a dispute resolution service called Verify. In the issuer category we have FX services now through currency cloud, that’s a broad gauge set of solutions.
So we have issuer solutions, acceptance solutions, and then our risk services, which you’re all familiar with. We’ve been doing that for a very long time. And we keep adding to that with businesses like CardinalCommerce that does authentication. And then finally, we have our advisory business. So those are the four categories. We keep adding services. Over the last several years, we acquired CardinalCommerce, which is authentication; we acquired Verify, which was dispute resolution in a broader set of capabilities that we can serve other networks to do dispute resolution. We have clearly tokenization as part of that. We acquired currency cloud that allows us to do real time FX and FX for a whole range of businesses beyond traditional financial institutions.
And the way it gets sold is, we have our relationships. And we have people who manage those relationships, they call them the generalists. But they also have increasingly specialized sales forces, who sell these specific services, which are unique in their own way. And then we have delivery people who can help clients set themselves up. So it requires a rewiring of the whole business. And that’s a reflection of why the business is now organized the way it is. We now have a leader for value added services. We have a leader for new flows, it reflects the three engines of growth that we see, carrying Visa into the future.
Darrin Peller
And the margin structure of the value added services business. I mean, some of them seem a little more hands on and obviously a network. So can you help us understand that?
Vasant Prabhu
Well, if it’s a if it’s a transaction service, like processing, issue processing, or CyberSource, or even our — services, they leverage a lot of our existing infrastructure. And they tend to be very high margin businesses, where the margins are lower would be in things like consulting, which is more people intensive. So the value added services come with a wide range of margins. But anything we can layer on to a transaction is incremental revenue. And it’s, it’s good margin, it’s margin that in any other business, you would think is a great margin, except that, we have a, a really good margin in our core business. But many of these value added services, especially the ones that are very transactions based, have very attractive margins, often very close to our traditional business.
Darrin Peller
Have you ever disclosed, how many of your customers actually already use these value added services?
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, I think we’ve given some statistics. I think more than half of our customers use more than five. I mean, we have many, many services. Five is just a small number of them. I think a third use more than 10. So there’s a huge opportunity to deepen penetration of these services. There’s a huge opportunity to have more clients by these services, some of these services started out mostly as U.S. businesses, there’s an opportunity to grow them outside the U.S., which is what we’re doing with CyberSource. And CardinalCommerce and Currencycloud, and there’s a big global opportunity.
So the thing about value added services is it’s early innings. Even though we’ve been doing this for a while, there’s a much greater focus, we keep adding to the menu of services, we keep getting better at delivering them, we keep getting better at selling them, we keep getting better at helping our clients understand the value. So I think there’s a very long runway ahead of us.
Darrin Peller
One of the areas that I mean, correlate to services and new flows is really accounts payable account or some of the out some of the paid by bank we’re seeing and so there’s obviously concern around it. Right. Also, in terms of whether it’s a disintermediation risk for Visa. I think…
Vasant Prabhu
It’s the opposite. We could expand on that a little bit. I know there’s been a lot of focus on how is this going to come? If you look at the history of the last whatever, 5, 7, 8 years, we’ve made more progress, doing gaining use cases and volume that used to be on other networks, than other networks have made headway into consumer payments, right. And our approach has been that things like RTP and A2A are not competitors. They’re partners, right? I mean you talked about we’ve talked about our network of networks approach which is — I’ve given the analogy of like take a company like FedEx. It’s a FedEx branded service. You ship a package it gets to the other end, you don’t care how it gets there, they may use their own planes, they may use somebody else’s planes. And that’s the, that’s the model, right? The model is, it’s a Visa branded service. And we can do card-to-card account to account, account to card, etcetera. It’s our brand, it’s our reliability, it’s our security. Right? We will do it, we’ve got dispute resolution, what rails it rides on shouldn’t matter to you. And what this allows us to do is we now connect to I think, 36, ACH networks through Visa direct. I think there’s a dozen RTP networks. I think 15 or so card networks. It just vastly expands the reach of our network.
And as you know the value of the network is a function of the nodes, by being able, and most of these are open to us, because they’re all open networks, they’re not proprietary. We use them, and it’s good for them. It’s good for us, and we partner with them. And…
Darrin Peller
I think what you’re saying, so look, there’s obviously risk guys that you’re going to end up seeing whether it’s digital wallets or account-to-account like Zell right, take the place of what people are using the card networks for. However, what I think you’re saying is that Visa Direct, and your systems that allow for push and pull into the same adds the net increase of all the flows coming in from things like B2B.
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, I would say one last thing, which is a pipe by itself is has no it has no value. Right? Just because there’s a pipe doesn’t mean, it’s going to have volume, right? You have to have a service. And what people don’t recognize is that we’re not just a pipe, right. We offer a service, and the service has several components to it. One is security, which is very, very important, because it is a money. So if it’s a pipe, that bad security, that’s not a good thing. We offer dispute resolution which some of these pipes don’t offer where if you make a mistake, you can get your money back. And it’s done very well and very reliably. We run six nines, availability, six nines, which means they’re almost never done. In fact, if they’re ever down, it’s front page news. And we don’t like being on the front page. So some of these don’t offer that kind of reliability. So our goal is to have a service that is superior to what the other pipes can offer. But also use the other pipes if we need to deliver our service. So people often get confused by the idea that if there’s a pipe Oh, my God, that must be competition? No, you have to look at what’s the service? And is the service competitive with what we offer?
Darrin Peller
Speaking of Visa Direct, as you’re talking about it. I mean, it’s it had transaction growth. I think it was 36% in fiscal 2022, 5.9 billion transactions, that’s ex-Russia. But when thinking about that opportunity, I mean, what are you seeing the most progress, whether it’s B2B or other areas?
Vasant Prabhu
Well, I think the thing about Visa Direct is it offers a set of things that almost nobody else offers, right? It’s global in scope, which no RTP network or ACH network is. It’s real time, which is not true with Swift and other alternatives. It’s highly reliable, it’s highly secure. And it’s incredibly ubiquitous, right in terms of the endpoints. So it has some incredible advantages it offers and then it has our brand, don’t underestimate the value of our brand, because it implies a certain set of promises. The use cases are huge, remittance is a massive, massive business that we never played in. We have a very elegant, very cost effective solution. We’re working with all the major players, both new ones and traditional ones who are in remittances. I think remittance is going to be a very, very, very big business. It’s a massive total available market. And for lots of reasons we never played in it.
Now I think we have a much better mousetrap than alternatives. I’m very bullish on the revolutionising payroll. On demand payroll, I think could be a very, very big business in the long run. There’s already a lot going on there. Disbursements, people get all kinds of disbursements, from insurance companies, etcetera. We do that today. That’s a big business, marketplace payouts. Whether it’s Airbnb paying their host or Upwork, paying a supplier someone who does programming for you, we can deliver that.
So the use cases are quite significant. And every one of them has a massive TAM. Think about Visa Direct is not a product. Visa Direct is a capability. And it has multiple verticals, each of which has huge markets. So this is just very, very early days for Visa Direct.
Darrin Peller
Visa direct versus RTP. It’s another topic that comes up a lot. I think it’s I think it’s supposed to be a similar price similarly priced offering for real time payments and similar in terms of what it can deliver. But Visa Direct probably has some differences that I think in your view, probably going to give it a bit of an edge, maybe?
Vasant Prabhu
Oh, without a doubt. I mean, first of all, when it comes to being global RTP isn’t, right. So you’re just not competing, if you’re RTP on a global basis, so anything that has to do with cross border, I think Visa Direct is the only real time solution around. And then if you get a domestic, we offer a service that is more secure, more reliable, allows you to, dispute and get your money back that most RTP networks don’t today.
So we clearly offer a superior service. And we think that not only does that allow us to be more useful as a solution for people, but also get a better yield on it.
Darrin Peller
And in terms of the international adoption of Visa Direct or versus the likes of a PIX or some other international, how’s that going for it?
Vasant Prabhu
Well, the thing is, when you have networks like PIX or UPI, it lifts all boats, right. So, when the government gets involved and creates these networks, what the government does, as it has done in most of these places, is really gets people to use digital payments. They all end up having a digital credential, they get used to making digital payments, merchants start accepting digital payments, it vastly expands the universe of people who accept digital payments and make digital payments. And that lifts all boats.
So it grows the whole market. They get a certain type of transaction. But when it comes to high value transactions, you can’t underestimate the value of our brand. The brand matters, the security matters. Some of our – two of our fastest growing markets in the last five years have been Brazil and India. And it’s not a surprise. It’s because of all the things that have happened because of these networks, that has vastly expanded the usage of digital payments. And that helps us too. And we welcome them. We’re partners with many of them. We’re happy to work with all the governments because our role, our goal is the same as theirs, which is to be more inclusive, and get more people into the digital economy, to get more people to have bank accounts or have ways to pay that pull them into the financial economy. Our interests are very aligned. And we do benefit a lot.
Darrin Peller
So just to put it in perspective, if we had to rank the areas that Visa Direct is really having the most success, whether it’s P2P or its payouts, like insurance payouts or GDC.
Vasant Prabhu
Well P2P is always the first use case, and it is the one that gives you the volumes. I will then put cross border remittances as close second. I’d add in disbursements and marketplace payouts. And at some point, the revolutionising of payroll as the other use cases, but the number of use cases is very large. And you also have to be prioritized, because every one of these is a very, very big market.
Darrin Peller
Let’s let’s let’s shift gears a little bit in terms of investment, capital allocation. What are your priorities from a capital allocation standpoint?
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, nothing has changed. We’re fortunate to have a great business with great cash flow. Our priority is, it will be a crime not to invest in this business, because the returns are great. And you never want us to under invest. And it’s a long cycle business, that’s what makes the business a difficult business for a lot of people is you have to be very patient. You have to invest for a long period of time because network businesses don’t get created overnight. So you really have to be investing for revenues that you may not get for four or five years. I mean we were investing in Visa Direct a long time ago. So investing in the core business priority one, if we need to buy things to expand our capabilities, clearly that’s important. We return cash to shareholders in the form of a dividend. It’s a well stated dividend policy and dividend growth nicely with earnings. We return cash to shareholders, but we never borrow money to do that. We do it out of free cash flow. And nothing’s going to change on that.
Darrin Peller
And from an M&A perspective, just a little bit more detail on what kind of activity you’d be looking to do.
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, look, I think what we’ve shown over the last several years is, going back seven or eight years, we were not big acquirers. But we’ve been steadily been acquiring, capabilities. And they’ve all worked well. We’ve acquired CardinalCommerce that has given us an authentication business, which has done very well. We acquired Freedom, which gave us a business, B2B expense management capability. We just acquired Currencycloud, which I think will vastly expand our FX capabilities. We acquired Verify, which allowed us to dispute resolution for a very broad set of clients.
So I think we’ll keep adding capabilities where it makes more sense to buy rather than build, but we also build a lot on our own. So I don’t think our M&A game plan is going to change very much.
Darrin Peller
Still more of a tuck-in strategy then.
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, and now we’ve been adding capabilities like Earthport we did a few years ago that gave us access to bank accounts. Tink gives us open banking capabilities in the market where it’s most relevant, which is Europe. So that’s the kind of thing you’ll see us do more of.
Darrin Peller
And Vasant, what about on the regulatory front? It’s obviously something that we can’t ignore for Visa, or MasterCard for years. And so…
Vasant Prabhu
No, regulation has always been part of our business from day one. It will always be part of our business. And we always have to be good at explaining to regulators what our business is, and how we can help them and engage with regulators all over the world. And that’s what we’ve been doing.
Darrin Peller
There’s been some questions over whether there’s friction, I know, between other networks that process transactions with Visa, using their tokenization.
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, I mean, we’ve been allowing people to, I mean, there should not be any friction. I mean, tokenization is very good for everyone. It is drastically reducing fraud online. It will get rid of a lot of the fraud over time completely. So tokenization everybody agrees is a great thing. We allow everybody tokenized merchants are not inhibited on where they can route we can be make our tokens, the plans available tokenized to other networks. So and we’ve been doing it for a very long time. So there’s nothing on our front that makes it hard for people to use tokenization on other networks.
Darrin Peller
Okay, guys, I’m going to turn it to the audience in just one minute. So if you have any questions, now’s your time. But last year as CFO last fiscal year, as CFO of Visa, Vasant. So when you think about what you’re proud of what you want to see from the company over the next several years, as you pass the torch, maybe just leave us leave us with that?
Vasant Prabhu
Sure. Look, I think Visa today is in many ways, better positioned for growth than it was even eight years ago. So eight years ago, it had a great growth, trajectory. And, and it proved itself, right, meaning we more than doubled our revenue. We’ve almost tripled our EPS, a stock price almost tripled. So we had a great run. But if you look at where we were eight years ago, versus today, it’s a vastly different company. Right? Eight years ago, we were consumer payments business. Today, we are a consumer payments business with some extraordinary new growth engines in new flows and value added services, which I think has vastly expanded the total available market.
The other thing that I don’t think people understand is, the value of our network has gone up dramatically. Eight years ago, our network only did, you could say one thing and did very well, right, which is to take money from your bank or your credit, credit account and give it to a merchant one way, one way flow, consumers on one side, merchants on the other. Over the last several years now we can move money both ways, which is what allowed Visa Direct to happen. And we can move money from one node to another node, which allowed us to do all these things, P2P, G2C, etcetera. And not only that, we’ve completely changed how we think about things where eight years ago, we just did everything on our network. Now we are a network of networks. And so the nodes available have been vastly expanded, right. So that’s part one, a significantly more flexible network. Part two is we’ve taken a lot of the friction out of it in a big way. It is so much easier now to be part of our network. Whether you’re an acquirer or a merchant, I mean used to have dedicated devices with landlines, all you need is a smartphone at either end, you can tap the frictions gone down, which increases the value of the network.
And then another huge thing I will tell you is eight years ago, all we did was deal with traditional financial institutions issuing traditional financial institutions acquiring. And today, we deal with a vast array of partners, right? We become very good at partnering with a whole range of new players. We’re embedded in wallets, we’re embedded in phones. We’re working with a whole range of — we have become the biggest enabler of FinTech scaling, right? We are, I like to think of as the biggest enabler of disruption in the financial services business, because if you have a great idea, the way to scale it is to come to us. And it’s a win win proposition, you win, and we win, because that’s all new volume to us.
So if I look at Visa today versus and then we have the, we still have the margins and the cash flow, to invest in our business. And we’ve shown that we can do acquisitions to expand our capabilities. Eight years ago, we hadn’t been doing much in terms of acquisition. So I look at Visa Today. And I say, the opportunity set is far greater. The size of the available market is far greater. And the value of the network, right and what it can do is far greater than it was. So I’m actually more bullish about the future than I was even eight years ago.
Darrin Peller
Well, you’ve been great for the company and for shareholders. So thank you. Maybe we have time for one question.
Unidentified Analyst
This one a bit of a philosophical question for me. There’s always been some pressure about, kind of putting your network and shutting down maybe certain countries and vertical in the past when I asked the question to Mike or Jennifer, the answer was, we’re never going to weaponize our network. Obviously, with Russia that changed. You had some problem with mine geek as well. So kind of two question; first, what are the criteria going forwards about taking action against certain countries, certain merchants a certain vertical?
And the second question, do you think that halters your growth trajectories in certain markets that might not be so keen of having, an external agent kind of meddling with their payment system favoring maybe their own system?
Vasant Prabhu
Yes, it sounds like there are two kinds of questions there. So as it relates to the issue of where do we draw the line on what we would do or not do. We’ve always said that we will follow the law, whatever the law is, in the country we operate in, right. And laws can differ from country to country, we will follow the local law, and something may be legal in one country and not legal in another country, you still have to live by the laws of the place you operate. We don’t view ourselves as makers of laws. That’s not our business. We are here, look, we’re just, we’re, we’re a humble enabler of payments, that’s who we are. All we want to do is help people pay. That’s it, right?
I mean, we just want to make sure that if people want to pay digitally, we can enable that. That’s all we want to do. And so, we will do that. And we’ll follow the law. As relates to what happened in Russia and its ramifications for the future. I mean, that was a unique situation. In the end, I mean, we weren’t the only ones who did what we did, almost every American business and probably almost every European business ended up doing what they had to do. I don’t think you can draw a straight line from Russia to other countries. We engage with every other country. We know that nationalism is important. I mean, every country has to take care of their own interests, right. We understand that, and our goal is to work with the country to make sure they understand that, that we will do what we have to do to make sure that they feel comfortable that we are there to serve the needs of their people. And whatever their requirements are, we will comply with them. And that’s an active discussion going on everywhere in the world all the time.
Darrin Peller
Thanks, guys. Vasant, really appreciate having you again.
Vasant Prabhu
Thank you.
Darrin Peller
Guys, we have a great panel up next…