Visa Review page 11

Visa Card are the world's most widely used form of "plastic" payment. As of December 2000, more than $1.8 trillion in products and services were purchased using Visa Card, and Visa's worldwide market share, at sixty percent, was greater than that of all other major payment cards combined.

There are more than one billion Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink, and PLUS cards in the market today. Visa-branded cards are accepted at more than twenty million locations in more than 150 countries, making Visa the closest thing there is to a universal currency.