Visa Card

What is a Visa card?

Visa cards are payment cards that work on the Visa network and have the Visa logo on them. They are not issued by Visa itself but by various financial institutions that partner with Visa. Visa cards can be credit, debit, prepaid, or gift cards.
 

Visa Card Explained

Visa is a global leader in payment processing, and businesses widely accept their cards in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.

Some other payment processing companies that own their own networks are RuPay, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover.

A financial institution can choose to partner with Visa as its sole provider of payment card products. The issuer determines the terms and conditions for the Visa cards it issues and its target customers. Through various financial institution partnerships, visa cards are available to individual and business customers.

Service agreements include fees for bank transactions and Visa network services. Visa also works with merchants through different types of service agreements. Merchants that accept Visa cards pay Visa Inc. a small fee for each customer transaction as part of the cost for the network processing services the company offers.

Each Visa card uses the Visa payment processing network to process transactions. By partnering with Visa as a main payment processing network, payments can be made electronically and debited—or credited—to a cardholder’s account. Purchases are made with merchants that accept Visa cards. All Visa cards have a unique 16-digit number printed or embossed on the front and a microchip that protects the cardholder from card fraud. A magnetic stripe and a panel for the cardholder’s signature are on the back