Guys, thank you again for joining us. Again, I'm Darrin Peller, covering Fintech and payments at Wolfe Research. Joining us for day two of the Wolfe FinTech Forum, we're really happy to have Visa, which is our top pick. 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, who we've had many times with us through the years for meetings, and he's always been great to have. First of all, thanks for joining me, Vasant.
Thank you, Darrin. Good to see you.
Before we jump in, I guess, on any of the Visa-specific trends and details you're seeing, it 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 the last few days. 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?
Yeah, I think, you know, Speaking from the standpoint of a payments network, things have been completely normal. You know, debit and credit credentials have been usable without any disruptions whatsoever. We're settling every night. Really no impact whatsoever.
Okay.
you know
Even over the weekend. I mean, it settles usually on Sunday or Monday, right?
Yeah. No, in fact, there's been absolutely no, you know.
No friction?
No friction whatsoever.
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 your, the value proposition, right?
Yeah. I mean, we do have the backstop. You know, we always keep large amounts of cash, and the cash has always been, you know, there was never.
Any need?
any concern on that front.
Right. Let's just take it a step back then. I mean, a quick review, you guys put out a lot of data. Overall volume transaction levels from your most recent update through, you know, I think it was through January, like most recently.
Through February.
Through February.
Yeah.
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. It's been pretty notable around consumer spending, especially cross-border trends. E-com as well. I mean, the resilience of e-com has been pretty interesting and making folks think it's probably structural and here to stay. I mean, maybe just take a step back and remind us of some of the trends you're seeing.
Sure. Yeah, I think as you said, you know, if you sort of shut yourself, I like to say if you shut yourself up in a room and all you did was look at our numbers,
Yeah
which is really what we try to do, we try not to be influenced by the opinions you hear people, you know, express. Starting all the way back to January of 2022, the, you know, the business has been remarkably stable, right? It's been 43%-45%, 46% ahead of 2019 almost on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis. As you saw in February, once again, we had double-digit growth in the U.S. you know, e-commerce growing strongly, card-present growing strongly, debit growing strongly. Almost everything was at or about double digits or close to.
Yep.
Cross-border, you know, it's hard always to predict how cross-border is gonna recover. It did recover at roughly the pace we had expected in our first fiscal quarter, which was the last calendar quarter. You've seen the recovery continue in the February numbers. I think, you know, 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. Even if you look at it on a three year basis, which is still comparable to 2020 because COVID really started hitting in March, now the comparability to 2020 will end. It was still, you know, a nice recovery. Cross-border e-commerce, as you saw, was a 180 index, which was very, very strong.
Bottom line, I mean, really no change in trend to the end of, through the end of February.
Yeah.
Consumers are changing what they're doing within all that, as you know, going from products to services and, you know, more travel and entertainment and so on, and they're adjusting to inflation. The aggregate level of spend, which is really what we see, has been amazingly stable.
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.
Yeah.
That's been the case now, though.
Absolutely
I'd say six to nine months.
It continues, right. You know, we get this question a lot. If you dig into the numbers, what you find is very intuitive. You know. It's intuitive in the sense that, you know, people sat at home in 2021 and bought a lot of stuff. Now, you know, they've bought a lot of stuff, a lot of home improvement things, you know, lots of clothes, etcetera. Now they're spending their money on other things that they couldn't do in 2021 and early parts of 2022. What's driving the business is travel is very robust still. You know, entertainment is also extremely robust. Restaurants have recovered quite well. Services in general doing well. That doesn't mean products are doing badly. You know, if you just look at the...
You know, we've been sane through this whole thing because we focused on 2019 as the benchmark, so it prevented us from becoming, I say, manic depressive, right? Like, you know, like somehow we were geniuses in 2021, and now we're not. 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 19 is not bad at all. It's just that there was a big jump in 21, and compared to 21, it doesn't look so great.
Right.
If you were planning your business like 21 was the future, you're in trouble. If you're looking at 19, you'd say, "This is fine. I would take these numbers," you know? Travel hasn't fully recovered yet to where it would have been pre-COVID.
Right.
You know, even entertainment is now. Restaurants are mostly back. You know, all in all, consumers have just adjusted and they're adjusting to inflation. They're shifting some behaviors, but they're holding their aggregate spending.
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
Yeah
pre-COVID, right?
Yeah.
It jumped a lot during COVID.
Yeah.
It kind of stayed at that level even as folks are going back to brick-and-mortar stores.
Absolutely.
Is that something structural in your view?
I totally think it's structural. I mean, think about your own habits, right? I mean, going into the pandemic, there 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, you know, restaurant buying online. That's become also a habit. There's a variety of behaviors, you know, that have become. People have just gotten more comfortable doing things online, and those behaviors are definitely sticking.
Right.
There's also, you know, the, the back to work thing is now different. Not everybody, very few companies are back to work five days a week. You know, some of the card-present stuff may not come back in the long run. I mean, there's some research that says that, you know, 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. Behaviors have changed.
Yeah. When we think about the economics of the economic impact to your model of the behavioral changes. For example, is card-not-present generating better yields? Does it matter or is it more or less a wash?
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.
Right. Right.
You know, yields wise, they're roughly similar, have always been for us. You know, 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.
Right
We do a better job than other forms of payment when you're doing e-commerce.
There's more services attached to it.
There's more services, you know.
Fraud and the like.
Fraud, for example, is far more important in the e-commerce space, and we're very good at that. Reliability is very, very important.
Right.
We're very good at that. All the things we do well, you know, and dispute resolution is very important.
Sure
it helps.
How about travel? you were at 132% of 2019 levels in terms of ex intra-Europe cross-border travel, or around that range recently. I mean, if you. Are you seeing any impact from some of the reopening we're still seeing in Asia and China specifically yet...
Yeah
What's the progress been like?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we said that travel, cross-border travel was an element of the recovery this year.
Yeah
That there was still more recovery left in cross-border travel, we're seeing that. If you look at it, you know, Asia was a laggard, Asia has been recovering very nicely, I would expect by the end of the, you know, this quarter, Asia may be back to 2019 levels. The relevant fact is it's only back to 2019 levels, there's still more to go.
Yeah.
The other one that was a laggard was inbound to the U.S., and that's picking up but slowly. You know, 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, you know, out of Asia is gonna 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 would 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.
It's coming back only slowly. You know, they have to get landing slots. Outbound Chinese travel to the U.S. and Europe will be slow. You know, 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.
The beneficiaries right now are gonna be more within Asia, probably for the time being, maybe to the Middle East. Over time, it'll build to the U.S. and Europe. There's a lot of internal Chinese travel also going on. I mean, initially, you know, it's easier to travel within China because the airline capacity has come back faster. You know, there were initially some testing requirements. I think most of those are gone now. I think we'll start to see that more significantly as we get into, you know, the latter part of this year. As we said, we need the cross-border business to recover, and the China component is a big part of that.
Yeah. I mean, I think as a reminder, you talked about that... Well, the way we understood it was probably in the high single-digit percentage of ex intra-Europe business pre-COVID. Is that about right in terms of cross-border business?
Yeah. I mean, we don't, you know, we don't really wanna get into all that other than to say that if the cross-border business is gonna recover to pre-COVID levels, recovery in Asia and recovery from China is an important component of it.
Yeah.
That's the next leg of the recovery, you know. Asia is just getting to 100%, and there's no reason why it won't get back to where it used to be before. Frankly, the cross-border business, if rates for hotels and airlines stay where they are, 'cause transactions, you know, are lagging even the volumes you see.
Right. Right.
Right? There's more recovery to come in transactions and actual trips. You could see us go past the, you know, pre-COVID trend line at some point because, you know, rates are higher, but will they stick at higher levels? We'll have to wait and see.
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? If you were.
Yeah, travel was growing a little slower than that. E-commerce was growing faster. Yeah, it was in that range.
That would still extrapolate CAGR-wise to-.
Yeah, there's more to come.
over 140% now if nothing ever happened with the pandemic.
Yeah, there's more to come. Another component that's been very healthy is cross-border e-commerce.
Yeah.
New behavior through the pandemic is the idea that if I'm buying online, I'm not that sensitive to where the product comes from. Cross-border e-commerce has really picked up. A lot of global, you know, suppliers have learned that, you know, cross-border e-commerce is a good source of business. 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.
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, I think it's 20% of your revenues now...
Yeah.
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 on that?
That's our view too. You know, our core business is consumer payments, right? I still believe there's a very strong runway there. There are still, you know, the pandemic has been wonderful for digitization of cash around the world. You know, more people have digital credentials to pay. Infrastructures have gotten better. I remain extremely confident that the consumer payments business has a very long runway and very healthy growth. Think of it as we have 2 more vectors of growth we've added on in the last 8 years.
You know, 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, et cetera, et cetera. That's a source of volume growth on top of consumer payments that we never had before. Then the other vector of growth is value-added services. 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.
Yep.
We've got two new vectors of growth, one that drives volume over and above consumer payments, another that drives value over and above the transaction, and they are growing much faster than consumer payments today. You saw growth has been 20% in the last few quarters. 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.
Right. Honing in a little bit more on value-added services, again, that's 20% of your revenue now. That's gone up 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-
Yeah.
Why they're growing so well.
Yeah, we have, you know, we categorize them into four categories. There are solutions we have for our issuers. You know, in that would be issuer processing, for example. In that would be, you know, a variety of services that are related to, you know, Visa Account Updater, where, you know, you don't have to change your card number when you get a new card, et cetera, et cetera. 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 Verifi. You know. In the issuer category, we have FX services now through Currencycloud. That's a broad gauge set of solutions. 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. We keep adding to that with businesses like Cardinal Commerce that does authentication. Finally, we have our advisory business. Those are the four categories. We keep adding services. You know, over the last several years, you know, we acquired Cardinal Commerce, which was authentication. We acquired Verifi, which was dispute resolution in a broader set of capabilities that we can serve other networks to do dispute resolution. You know, we have clearly tokenization as part of that. You know, we acquired Currencycloud that allows us to do real-time FX and FX for, you know, a whole range of businesses beyond traditional financial institutions. The way it gets sold is, you know, we have our relationships, and we have people who manage those relationships. They call them the generalists.
We also have increasingly specialized sales forces, you know, who sell these specific services, which are unique in their own way. Then we have delivery people who can help clients set themselves up. It requires a rewiring of the whole business, and that's a reflection of why the business is now organized the way it is, you know. We now have a leader for value-added services. We have a leader for, you know, new flows. It reflects the three engines of growth.
Yeah.
that we see, you know, carrying Visa into the future.
The margin structure of the value-added services business, I mean, Some of them seem a little more hands-on than obviously a network.
Yeah.
Can you help us understand that?
Well, if it's a transaction service like.
Yeah.
Processing, issuer processing or CyberSource or even our risk services, you know, they leverage a lot of our existing infrastructure, they tend to be very high-margin businesses. Where the margins are lower would be in things like consulting, which is more people-intensive. The value-added services come with a wide range of margins, anything we can layer on to a transaction is incremental revenue. It's, you know, it's good margin. It's margin that in any other business you would think is a great margin, except that, you know, we have a, you know, a really good margin in our core business. 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.
Have you ever disclosed how many of your customers actually already use these value-added services?
Yeah. I think we've given some statistics. You know, I think more than half of our customers use more than five. I mean, we have many, many services.
Yeah.
Five is just a small, you know, number of them. I think a third use more than 10. There's a huge opportunity to deepen penetration of these services. There's a huge opportunity to have more clients, you know, buy 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, you know, Cardinal Commerce and Currencycloud, and there's a big global opportunity. The thing about value-added services is it's early innings, you know, 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, you know, helping our clients understand the value.
I think there's a very long runway ahead of us.
One of the areas that, I mean, correlate to services and new flows is really account to account . You know, some of the, some of the pay by bank we're seeing.
Yeah.
There's obviously concern around it, right? Also, in terms of whether it's a disintermediation risk for Visa. I think it's actually.
It's the opposite. It's the opposite.
Yeah. Maybe you could expand on that a little bit.
I know there's been a lot of focus on, you know, how is this going to come? If you look at the history of the last, whatever, five, seven, eight years, we've made more progress gaining use cases and volume that used to be on other networks than other networks have made headway into consumer payments, right? You know, our approach has been that things like RTP and A2A are not competitors, they're partners, right? I mean, we've talked about our network of networks approach, which is, you know, I've given the analogy of, like, take a company like FedEx. You know, 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.
Yep.
That's the, you know, that's the model, right? The model is it's a Visa-branded service, and we can do card to card, account to account to card, et cetera. 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. What this allows us to do is we now connect to, I think, 36 ACH networks through Visa Direct. I think there's a 12 RTP networks, I think 15 or so card networks. It just vastly expands the reach of our network. As you know, the value of the network is a function of the nodes. Most of these are open to us because they're all open networks. They're not proprietary.
you know, we use them, and it's good for them, it's good for us, and we partner with them.
Right.
And-
Look, there's obviously risk, guys, that you're gonna end up seeing, whether it's digital wallets or account to account like Zelle, 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 P2P.
Yeah, I would say one last thing, which is a pipe by itself is has no value, right? Just because there's a pipe doesn't mean it's gonna have volume.
Right.
You have to have a service. 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. You know, one is security, which is very, very important because this is money. If it's a pipe with bad security, that's not a good thing.
Right.
We offer dispute resolution, which some of these pipes don't offer, where if you make a mistake, you can get your money back. It's done very well and very reliably. We run six nines availability. six nines, which means they're almost never done . If they're ever down, it's front page news, and we don't like being on the front page. You know, some of these don't offer that kind of reliability. 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. People often get confused by the idea that if there's a pipe, oh my God, that must be competition. You have to look at what's the service and is the service competitive with what we offer.
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. When thinking about that opportunity, I mean, where are you seeing the most progress, whether it's P2P or other areas?
Well, I think, you know, 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.
Yep.
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. 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. You know, remittances is a massive business that we never played in. We have a very elegant, very, you know, a very cost-effective solution. We're working with all the major players, both new ones and traditional ones who are in remittances. I think remittances is gonna be a very big business. It's a massive total available market, and for lots of reasons, we never played in it. I think we have a much better mousetrap than alternatives.
I'm very bullish on the revolutionizing of 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. You know, disbursements, people get all kinds of disbursements from insurance companies, et cetera. We do that today. That's a big business. Marketplace payouts.
Yep.
You know, whether it's Airbnb paying their host or Upwork paying a supplier, you know, someone who does, you know, programming for you, we can deliver that. The use cases are quite significant, and every one of them has a massive TAM. Think about Visa Direct is not a product, right? Visa Direct is a capability, and it has multiple verticals, each of which has huge markets. This is just very, very early days for Visa Direct.
Visa Direct versus RTP.
Yeah.
It's another topic that comes up a lot. 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. Visa Direct probably has some differences that I think in your view probably would have give it a bit of an edge.
Without a doubt. I mean, first of all, when it comes to being global, RTP isn't, right? You're just not competing if you're RTP on a global basis. Anything that has to do with cross-border, I think Visa Direct is the only real-time solution around. If you get to domestic, you know, we offer a service that is more secure, more reliable, allows you to, you know, dispute and get your money back that most RTP networks don't today. We clearly offer a superior service and, you know, we think that not only does that allow us to be more useful as a solution for people but also, you know, get a better yield on it.
In terms of the international adoption of Visa Direct or, you know, versus the likes of a Pix or some other international, how is that going for Visa?
Well, the thing is, when you have networks like Pix or UPI, it lifts all boats, right? 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, you know, 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. It grows the whole market. You know, they get a certain type of transaction, but when it comes to high-value transactions, you know, you can't underestimate the value of our brand. The brand matters. The security matters.
You know, two of our fastest-growing markets in the last five years have been Brazil and India. 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. We welcome them. We're partners with many of them. We're happy to work with all the governments because 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, you know, have ways to pay that would pull them into, you know.
Yeah
the financial economy. Our interests are very aligned, and we do benefit a lot.
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 it's payouts like insurance payouts.
Yeah
or G2C, what would be-
P2P is always the first use case, and it is the one that gives you the volumes. I would then put cross-border remittances.
Okay
close second.
Wow.
I'd add in, disbursements and marketplace payouts and at some point, you know, the revolutionizing of payroll as, you know, the other use cases. The number of use cases is very large, and we also have to be prioritized because every one of these is a very, very big market.
Let's shift gears a little bit in terms of investment, capital allocation. You know, what are your priorities from a capital allocation standpoint?
Yeah, nothing's changed. You know, we're fortunate to have a great business with great cash flow. Our priority is it would be a crime not to invest in this business because the returns are great, and you never want us to underinvest. It's a long cycle business. You know, 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. 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. Investing in the core business, priority one. If we need to buy things to expand our capabilities, clearly that's important.
You know, we return cash to shareholders in the form of a dividend. It's a well-stated dividend policy, and the dividend grows nicely with our earnings. We return cash to shareholders, but we never borrow money to do that. You know, we do it out of free cash flow. Nothing's gonna change on that front.
From an M&A perspective, just a little bit more detail on what kind of activity you'd be looking to do.
Yeah, look, I think what we've shown over the last several years is y ou know, going back seven or eight years, we were not big acquirers, but we've been steadily acquiring, you know, capabilities. They've all worked well. You know, we've acquired Cardinal Commerce. That has given us an authentication business, which has done very well. We acquired Fraedom, which gave us a, you know, a business B2B expense management capability. We just acquired Currencycloud, which I think will vastly expand our FX capabilities. We acquired Verifi, which allowed us to dispute resolution for a very broad set of, you know, clients. I think we'll keep adding capabilities where it makes more sense to buy rather than build. We also build a lot on our own. I don't think our M&A game plan is gonna change very much.
Okay. Still more of a tuck-in strategy than-
Yeah, we've now, you know, we've been adding capabilities like Earthport we did a few years ago.
Right
that gave us access to bank accounts. Tink gives us open banking capabilities-
Yeah
In the market where it's most relevant, which is Europe. That's the kind of thing you'll see us do more of.
Vasant, what about on the regulatory front? It's obviously something that we can't ignore for Visa.
Yeah
Or Mastercard for years.
No, regulation has always been part of our business from day one. It'll 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.
There, there's been some questions over whether there's friction, I know, between other networks that process transactions with Visa using their tokenization.
I mean, we've been allowing people to, you know. 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. Tokenization, everybody agrees is a great thing. We allow everybody to tokenize. Merchants are not inhibited on where they can route. We make our tokens, you know, the PANs available to tokenize to other networks, we've been doing it for a very long time. There's nothing on our front that makes it, you know, hard for people to use tokenization on other networks.
Okay. Guys, I'm gonna turn it to the audience in just one minute, so if you have any questions, now's your time. Last year as CFO, last fiscal year as CFO of Visa, Vasant. When you think about what you're proud of, what you wanna see from the company over the next several years as you pass the torch, maybe just leave us, leave us with that.
Sure. Look, I think Visa today is in many ways, better positioned for growth than it was even eight years ago eight years ago, you know, it had a great growth, you know, trajectory, and it, and it proved itself, right? Meaning we more than doubled our revenue, we've almost tripled our EPS, our stock price almost tripled. We had a great run. But if you look at where we were eight years ago versus today, it's a vastly different company.
Yeah.
Eight years ago, we were a 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, you know, our network only did, you could say one thing, and did it very well, right? Which is to take money from your bank or your credit, you know, credit account and give it to a merchant. One way, one way flow, you know. 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. We can move money from one node to another node, which allowed us to do all these things, P2P, you know, G2C, et cetera. Not only that, we've completely changed how we think about things. Where 8 years ago, we just did everything on our network. Now we are a network of networks. 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, you used to have dedicated devices with landlines.
All you need is a smartphone at either end. You can tap. The friction's gone down, which increases the value of the network. Another huge thing I would tell you is eight years ago, all we did was deal with traditional financial institutions issuing, traditional financial institutions acquiring. Today, we deal with a vast array of partners, right? We've become very good at partnering with, you know, a whole range of new players. You know, we're embedded in wallets. We're embedded in phones. You know, we're working with a whole range of... We've become the biggest enabler of Fintech scaling, right? I like to think of us 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. If I look at Visa today versus. Then we have the, you know, 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 acquisitions. I look at Visa today and I say, the opportunity set is far greater. The, 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. I'm actually more bullish about the future than...
That's great.
I was even eight years ago.
That's great. You've been great for the company and for shareholders, thank you.
Thank you.
Maybe we have time for one question. This one in the middle over there.
All right. Bit of a philosophical question from me. You know, there's always been some pressure about, you know, 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 gonna weaponize our network." Obviously, with Russia, that changed. You had some problem with MindGeek as well. Kind of two questions. First, what are the criteria going forward about, you know, taking action against a certain country, a certain merchant, a certain vertical? The second question, do you think that halters your growth trajectories in certain markets that might not be so keen of having, you know, an external agent kind of meddling with their payment system, favoring maybe their own system?
Yeah. It sounds like there are two kinds of questions there. As it relates to, you know, the issue of where do we draw the line on what we would do and not do, we've always said that we will follow the law, whatever the law is in the country we operate in, right? Laws can differ from country to country. You, you sort of have to live by the laws of the place you operate in. We don't view ourselves as makers of laws. You know, that's not our business. We're just, we're a humble enabler of payments. That's who we are. All we wanna do is help people pay. That's it, right?
I mean, we just wanna make sure that if people wanna pay digitally, we can enable that. That's all we wanna do. You know, we will do that, and we'll follow the law. As it 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. You know, we engage with every other country. You know, 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 we will do what we have to do to make sure that, you know, they feel, you know, comfortable that we're there to serve the needs of their people. Whatever their requirements are, we will comply with them. That's an active discussion going on everywhere in the world all the time.
Thanks, guys. Vasant, really appreciate having you again. It was great to have you.
Yeah. Thank you.
Guys, we have a great panel up next. Temperature check on the consumer.