Visa had numbers after hours, a one cent (penny) beat in earnings

Visa had numbers after hours, a one cent (penny) beat in earnings, and also beat on the top line. Follow the link to their results: Visa Inc. Posts Strong Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2010 Earnings Results and Authorizes New $1 Billion Share Repurchase Plan. Quite simply, More folks using their Visa cards to process payments. Soon the Fed will have to print plastic (ha-ha). The overall transaction increase (more swipes) increased by 16 percent. And the company are proceeding down the road of buying back as much as a billion Dollars worth of stock, as well as boosting the quarterly dividend by 20 percent. Nice.



The year ahead is mapped out by chief Joseph Saunders: "Looking ahead to our fiscal 2011, Visa will continue to invest in initiatives and investments to grow our core and emerging product portfolios globally, innovate into new payments channels and integrate our recent acquisition of CyberSource. We are committed to delivering solid business performance, supporting our financial clients and partners, and delivering above average shareholder returns."




BUT, there is of course looming government legislation regarding the charges that credit card issuers can push through, and they make a serious reference to this:

"the impact of the U.S. Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, including:


its effect on issuers' and retailers' network selection for debit transactions;


its effect on our financial institution customers and on debit interchange rates;


its effect on other product categories, such as credit; and


the adoption of similar and related laws and regulations elsewhere;"

I guess the last one is the most important one to their business, but we like this one a lot and continue to recommend them, even though the headwinds have been many lately, in the form of government scrutiny. We continue to believe that more payments will be done electronically over the coming years, and those that own the highways will collect the toll fees. Sound familiar. The after-hours market participants were more wary of the commentary that the actual results and announcement of buyback, the stock down 2.3 percent in the post market session.