IMHO the entire market got staged last week just to sucker
a bunch of small retail investors into an IPO with dubious &
demini****ng
potential.
I am now hearing that WallMart is planning to go ahead with
its own private label card due to the huge amount of fees it
pays to process simple payments.
Secondly, VISA set aside a full 20% of the IPO price for legal
and contingent fees from merchants paying what amounts to
fixed pricing on transactions.
In typical american fa****on, no hard questions got asked by the press,
no negative reviews of slipping trans volumes and higher provisions
for internet fraud.
Payment volume and transactions, which Visa says "are key drivers of
our business," went the wrong way in the last fiscal year. Visa
officials declined to comment, saying they are in the "quiet period"
following the IPO.
But according to the IPO prospectus, the growth rate of transaction
volume at Visa USA slipped to 10.8% in the fiscal year ended in June
2007, from 17% in 2006. The growth rate of payment volume, meanwhile,
slid to 9.6% last year, from 17% the prior year. Part of that, says,
is a plateau of debit-card growth in the U.S. But the company also
discloses that it expects the rest of this year to be hurt by the
slowing economy.
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