October 11th, 2006 by Jamie Estep
Visa is going public
Filed in: Industry News | 2 comments
Following the lead of MasterCard, Visa announced today that they are restructuring their company on a global scale including an IPO for the American branch of Visa.
Visa announced today that it intends to restructure its organization in order to create a new public global corporation called Visa Inc. As a part of this restructuring, Visa Europe will remain a membership association, owned and governed by its European member banks, and become a licensee of Visa Inc. Visa expects the proposed restructuring will best position the company to meet the evolving needs of its customers and will accelerate its growth by improving organizational efficiency, addressing certain legal claims that exist in some markets, and increasing access to capital.
MasterCard’s IPO was extremely successful, more than anyone thought, and Visa has the ability to make a lot of money with a public offering. This money will definitely be partly used as padding for a plethora of major upcoming lawsuits, that could cost Visa hundreds of millions.
Subsequently, MasterCard reported a drop in their stock almost immediately after Visa announced its new plan. MasterCard stock has been assumed to be high above its actual value, and this could trigger the beginning of a slump for MasterCard.
Any update as when Visa is going public?
Still nothing formal, but they have completed a lot of the back-end stuff to get it moving. I still estimate the late first, or early second quarter of 2008. Nothing I have heard has put it back further than that, and it’s not going to happen this year.