Visa taps into global payments opportunity with Visa Direct
During its investor day last week, Visa gave a substantial update on Visa Direct – its B2B2X solution enabling businesses, banks and governments to enable P2P, B2B, B2C and government-to-consumer (G2C) payments globally. The platform saw nearly 10 billion transactions in 2024, but in terms of the global opportunity, Visa is just getting started.
Visa Direct’s growth over time
Visa Direct is one part of the company’s Commercial and Money Movement Solutions (CMS) (formerly known as New Flows), with the other being Visa Commercial Solutions (VCS) a card and virtual payments-led business. Altogether, CMS net revenue has grown at a 22% CAGR since 2021, with the segment seeing $1.7tn in volume in Visa’s FY 2024 results.
This growth has been driven by a sixfold rise in Visa Direct transactions – from just 1.6 billion in 2019 to approximately 10 billion in 2024 – while the number of endpoints served by the platform has more than tripled from roughly 3.5 billion in 2019 to more than 11 billion currently.
The company also noted that Visa Direct has generated approximately $0.09 to $0.10 per transaction, which it said reflected its current mix and was slightly better than Visa’s total data processing yield. If we combine this with its number of transactions for 2024, this would mean the company had generated approximately c.$900m-1bn through Visa Direct transactions throughout the year.
Expanding Visa Direct’s use cases
Aside from piggybacking off its own network, Visa has achieved significant endpoint and transaction growth by launching its own solution targeting large B2B transactions (Visa B2B Connect), as well as acquiring other companies in the space, including Earthport, Currencycloud and YellowPepper.
In late 2024, these companies were brought together under one consolidated Visa Direct brand, which currently enables transfers to over 195 countries and territories with more than 150 currencies. As it has expanded its coverage, Visa Direct’s number of use cases has grown from 20 in 2019 to more than 65 today.
Visa Direct’s growth opportunity
Looking at Visa Direct’s potential impact in the future, Visa sees a $200tn annual volume opportunity for CMS, spanning a mix of domestic and cross-border payments. Of this $200tn, B2B payments accounts for $145tn and non-B2B money movement flows the other $55tn. Visa Direct is primarily addressing the latter, made up of B2C and P2P flows (both accounting for $20tn of the global opportunity) as well as G2C payments ($15tn). Of these, P2P is currently Visa Direct’s largest cross-border use case, driven by partnerships with major remitters and banks worldwide.
However, the solution is also expected to address a $25tn opportunity for B2B payments. This means that, in total, Visa Direct is set to address around 40% of CMS’ total payments volume opportunity ($80tn), with around 69% of this figure being consumer payments.
Meanwhile, Visa’s VCS business will address a $35tn card and virtual payments opportunity, which includes a mix of domestic and cross-border payments. Taking Visa Direct and VCS together, Visa is actively pursuing $60tn of the identified $145tn global B2B opportunity; the remaining $85tn was noted as remaining AP/AR flows, where the company sees “more of an R&D opportunity” (i.e. where its products could become salient in the future).
Visa noted that domestic use cases still make up the majority of Visa Direct transactions (for example, helping consumers move money into and out of digital wallets). Having said this, while domestic transactions have grown at an annualised rate of more than 40% over the last five years, cross-border Visa Direct transactions have seen faster growth – at more than 50% over this period – while total cross-border P2P transactions grew over 80% in the last fiscal year.
Going forward, Visa has three prongs to its Visa Direct strategy: growing its domestic business by strengthening P2P; growing its cross-border flows through an enhanced network; and selling more cases and services to existing Visa Direct clients. Despite solid growth, the figures it has provided indicate the solution is still only breaking the surface of a massive global market.
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