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A few facts about credit card networks
Posted on May 15, 2008 by Tom Fragala
I thought it might be interesting to give you a rough idea of the immense size of the credit, debit and prepaid card processing market. Here is some data (2006 figures) on the top 3 operators of retail electronic payment networks, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. These three are the networks, which essentially do data processing, not the actual issuers (cardholder's bank) or acquirers (merchant's bank).
- Visa: $2.1 trillion in payments volume, 44 billion transactions, and 1.2 billion cards
- Mastercard: $1.4 trillion in payments volume, 23 billion transactions, and 817 million cards
- American Express: $550 billion in payments volume, 4.5 billion transactions, and 78 million cards
American Express is a "closed-loop" network, meaning they issue cards and serve merchants directly. Hence the large payments volume for the relatively smaller number of cards. Visa and Mastercard neither issue cards nor maintain accounts with merchants.
Visa and Mastercard are "open-loop" networks, meaning they operate a system that connects two banks--the issuer (cardholder) and the acquirer (merchant).
Data from Visa Inc.
Filed under: Credit
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