Annual Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay transaction volume worldwide 2014-2023

Nearly four out of 10 global card transactions in 2023 took place with a Visa-branded card. Roughly 266 billion purchase transactions worldwide involved Visa payment cards that year. That would equal approximately 0.72 billion Visa transactions per day in 2023. Note that all figures provided are estimates on general-purpose cards. While the source does not add additional information on this term, it may include debit and credit cards both. Visa's official figures on credit cards alone claim the company processed 87 billion transactions in 2022.

How big are Visa credit cards on a country-by-country basis?

Visa does not share credit card figures for individual countries. Instead, it only looks at the United States against the rest of the world. The U.S. was home to one out of three of all Visa credit cards issued worldwide in late 2022. Website trackers hope to add more information on the market size of individual payment providers between different countries. The number of U.S. websites offering Visa as a payment method was far higher than those from other countries in 2022.

Where is Mastercard bigger than Visa?

Visa was not automatically the largest card provider in every country. Mastercard and Visa had varying market shares across 14 European countries in 2021. Mastercard held market shares of 88 percent and 70 percent in the Netherlands and Sweden, respectively. Mastercard was also bigger than Visa in Brazil, making up nearly half of all card payments in the Latin American country. Visa and Mastercard combined take up the majority of transactions within most individual countries. They rarely face competition from domestic card schemes.