SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Al Kelly believes there has been a permanent shift in how consumers worldwide pay for goods and services. His 91-year-old parents are a prime example.
The CEO of payments processing giant Visa recently visited his mother just after she’d finished buying her groceries online – something she’d never done prior to COVID-19.
“She said to me ‘I cannot believe I wasn’t doing this before the pandemic,'” Kelly said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Kelly is more than five years into his tenure as the head of one of the world’s largest payments companies and arguably, one of the world’s best-known brands. Since he took over, the company’s stock has tripled in value as more of us pay with Visa’s credit and debit cards – a trend bolstered by the pandemic, as once cash-only establishments started accepting plastic and shoppers did more transactions online.
But while the shift to online shopping is helping Visa’s bottom line, the company is facing new forms of competition, particularly from Silicon Valley, who have debuted alternative forms of payment that go around the traditional Visa and Mastercard networks.