Mumbai: Consumer spending in Visa cards hit a record US $5 billion on 24 December 2001, the peak holiday shopping day worldwide. This enabled Visa International to further reinforce its position as the world's preferred way to shop by setting a new global record for the number of transactions processed during the 2001 December holiday shopping season.
 Visa's transaction processing systems, known as VisaNet, reached a peak of 4,163 transactions a second with zero-down time. This was almost twice the average for the year as a whole. From 23 November until 24 December, Visa cardholders around the world made nearly 2 billion purchases valued at a total of $120 billion. This represented a double-digit growth for Visa worldwide, and more volume than all other major payment card brands combined. A record 7.6 million transactions were processed during the busiest shopping day in Asia Pacific. Shoppers used Visa credit, debit and prepaid cards to purchase nearly $375 million of goods and services on that day, signaling that consumers in Asia Pacific are increasingly recognising the convenience of making payments with cards instead of cash or cheques.
|
