Visa, Inc.

Visa Inc. is a publicly traded multinational payment technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1958 as the BankAmericard credit card program by Bank of America, the company was restructured and renamed Visa in 1976. It later went public in 2008 in one of the largest IPOs in history. Visa trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol V. As of early 2026, the company has a market capitalization of approximately $600 billion, with reported annual revenue of around $40 billion and a global workforce of about 34,000 employees.

Visa operates as a payment technology company, not a bank; it does not issue cards, extend credit, or set rates for consumers. Instead, it provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products, including credit, debit, and prepaid cards. The company's core function is operating the VisaNet global processing network, which provides authorization, clearing, and settlement of electronic payment transactions for consumers, merchants, businesses, and government entities in over 200 countries. In fiscal year 2025, Visa's network processed hundreds of billions of transactions.

As a major operating company, Visa is primarily a defendant in patent litigation. The provided case data shows the company as a defendant in one tracked case and as a plaintiff in none. This defensive posture is typical for large technology corporations that are often targets of patent assertion entities (NPEs).

The single tracked case, Cortex MCP, Inc. v. Visa, Inc., was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in early 2023. This litigation activity aligns with Visa's position as a prominent financial technology firm that must defend its global payment infrastructure and services against patent infringement claims.