Visa reported its fiscal fourth quarter on October 27, and the headline numbers were the kind the company likes to print. Net revenue was $12.1 billion, up 13%. Non-GAAP earnings per share were $3.48, up 17%. For the full year ended September 30, net revenue came to $45.9 billion, up 15%, which chief executive Ryan McInerney called the strongest growth in more than 15 years once you leave out the post-pandemic rebound and acquisitions.
One line in the release grew faster than all of that. Client incentives, the money Visa hands back to banks, merchants and other partners to win and keep their card volume, reached $5.1 billion in the quarter. That’s up 21%. For the year they came to $18.3 billion, up 16%, again ahead of revenue.
Incentives are booked as a reduction of revenue, so the 13% figure is already net of them. Gross revenue before incentives grew faster still. The point is what the gap says about the business. Payments volume grew 9% in the quarter. Processed transactions were 74.2 billion, up 10%. Visa is still growing its core network, but the cost of holding on to the issuers and large merchants who decide where that volume goes is rising faster than the volume itself.
The growth is moving away from the swipe
The part of Visa that grew fastest has little to do with a card at a till. “Other revenue” rose 40% to $1.6 billion in the quarter and 40% to $5.7 billion for the year. Management said that line is mostly value-added services, which grew 30% in constant dollars for the full year: fraud and risk tools, data and analytics, issuer processing, consulting. Data processing revenue rose 16% to $6.2 billion and service revenue 14% to $5.3 billion.
International transaction revenue is the odd one out. It rose 8% to $4.1 billion while cross-border volume grew 14%. Travel and online shopping across borders are still growing quickly. Visa is earning less per dollar of it than a year ago.
That mix explains the deals. Visa agreed in August to buy BioCatch, a behavioural fraud detection company, for $2.4 billion in cash, with closing expected by the end of its fiscal second quarter of 2027. In October it moved Visa Direct stablecoin money movement from pilots into production and started a live pilot of AI agent payments with BILL and Billtrust. None of that shows up in this quarter’s numbers. All of it points the same way, toward selling services around the transaction rather than relying on the per-swipe fee.
What shareholders got, and what’s held back
Visa returned $5.2 billion in the quarter through buybacks and dividends and $25.6 billion over the year. It bought back about 61 million shares for $20.5 billion at an average of $335.49, and has $24.4 billion of authorization left. The quarterly dividend goes up 16% to $0.78 a share, payable December 1 to holders of record on November 10.
The quarter also carried a $469 million litigation provision tied to the US interchange multidistrict litigation, part of $1.7 billion in litigation items for the year, plus $563 million in severance costs over the year. On September 18 Visa put another $405 million into its US litigation escrow account. Interchange fights in the US and in Europe remain the biggest open risk to the model.
For fiscal 2027 Visa guided to low-double-digit growth in both net revenue and operating expenses, with earnings per share growing low double digits to low teens. That’s a step down from 15%. Shares slipped about 1% after hours to $397.42.
The read across to the rest of the card market is mixed. American Express raised its own guidance last week while cutting about 3,500 jobs as spending growth slowed. Visa’s 9% volume growth says the consumer is still spending. The rising incentive bill says the banks issuing the cards know how much that volume is worth, and are charging Visa more for it every year.