We operate VisaNet, one of the world’s largest electronic payments networks. This allows you to use your Visa card almost everywhere in the world. Learn more about VisaNet.
When you use a Visa card (or other payment product), we receive your payment card number and other information that allows us to process your payment. We receive the date, time, location, and amount of the transaction, and information about the merchant. These data elements are referred to as “Card Transaction Data.” We may receive other financial information when processing transactions and providing services to our clients.
We use and disclose Card Transaction Data to enable your payments and as needed to:
- Operate Visa’s electronic payments networks, including for core financial processing activities such as authorisation, clearing and settlement of transactions, and for related purposes, such as authentication, tokenization, dispute resolution, fraud prevention, and security
- Provide services to our clients. For example, if you have enrolled in an issuer or merchant loyalty programme, we will process Card Transaction Data to calculate your rewards and provide targeted offers to you from the client – learn more in the Loyalty & Rewards section of this page.
- Understand how you and others use our products, for analytics and modelling, to create business intelligence and insights and to understand economic trends
- Generate de-personalised, de-identified, anonymised or aggregated datasets, which are used for product development and delivery of consulting services to clients – learn more in the Visa Products and Services section of this page.
- Support for your everyday business needs, such as account management, quality control, website administration, business continuity and disaster recovery, security and fraud prevention, corporate governance, reporting and legal compliance
Your Choices
We appreciate that you have a choice about which payment products to carry and use. Our goal is to give you confidence to choose Visa because of our commitment to your privacy and security. You may contact us at any time with questions about our privacy practices.
In the U.S., the Card Transaction Data that Visa collects when it operates its payment networks is regulated by existing federal financial privacy laws. Outside the U.S., the information is protected by various international data protection laws.
Visa offers individuals the ability to opt out of having their Card Transaction Data used to create certain data products. As described in our Global Privacy Notice, in some countries, Visa uses Card Transaction Data to generate data products that companies use to improve their marketing programmes and identify interested consumers. These products do not contain any personal information, but they provide aggregated insights that support targeted marketing. If you do not want us to use your Card Transaction Data to generate these products, click here to opt out. Visa does not offer individuals the ability to opt out of having their Card Transaction Data used to create fraud, security and similar non-marketing products.