⚠ A Fifth of the Traffic Is Not YoursHigh threat

Visa (V) — threat to the moat

329 billion transactions carried the brand and Visa processed 258 billion — the clearest picture available of what a rule change looks like once it has finished arguing.

Visa discloses both numbers and does not dwell on the difference. In fiscal 2025, 329 billion payments and cash transactions carried its brand — an average of 901 million a day — and Visa itself processed 258 billion1. About one transaction in five on a Visa-branded card was routed across somebody else's network.

Visa-branded vs Visa-processed transactions, FY2025 (billions)329bnCarried the Visa brand258bnProcessed by VisaThe 71bn gap is American debit-routing policy, not competition
A regulator does not have to break a network to take a slice of it — only to require that an alternative be present.

That is not an accident or a failure of salesmanship. It is American debit policy. The Durbin amendment requires debit cards to carry at least two unaffiliated routing options and permits the merchant to choose the cheaper one. Visa keeps the brand, the issuer relationship and the service revenue; the data processing revenue, charged per transaction, goes to whoever actually moved the message.

The reason it matters well beyond the United States is that it demonstrates the mechanism in full. A regulator does not have to break a network to take a slice of it, and does not have to find a competitor either. It only has to require that an alternative be present and let the merchant pick. Watch the ratio of processed transactions to branded ones — if it keeps falling, routing mandates are doing what they were designed to do.

References
  1. ReportedIn fiscal 2025, 329 billion payments and cash transactions carried its brand — an average of 901 million a day — and Visa itself processed 258 billion
    Visa Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 (CIK 1403161), Item 1 Business — the network reaches approximately 12 billion cards, bank accounts and digital wallets and more than 175 million merchant locations across more than 200 countries and territories; nearly five billion payment credentials; clients comprise nearly 14,500 financial institutions; Tap to Pay provisioning is live for more than 1.4 billion Visa credit and debit cards with more than 600 participating issuers; Visa Direct processed more than 12.5 billion transactions for more than 650 partners and can reach approximately 12 billion endpoints through more than 90 domestic payment schemes and more than 60 card and wallet networks; during fiscal 2025, 329 billion payments and cash transactions carried the Visa brand, an average of 901 million a day, of which 258 billion were processed by Visa; the Visa as a Service stack's access layer includes on-demand APIs and an MCP server enabling AI systems to interface with Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs; stablecoins, generative AI and agentic commerce are named as next-generation technologies under investment — FY2025 (year ended 30 September 2025) · publ. 6 November 2025 · source ↗
Sources
Generated September 23, 2026