Industry committee  We don't, as we understand it, need regulatory authorization to enter the debit market; in fact, we've been trying to do that for almost a decade now. We didn't have the right interchange pricing to make it an attractive product for either merchants or the banks that issued cards

Finance committee  We're planning to offer choice at multiple levels. The way our product is designed, Interac and Visa are on the same piece of plastic. Consumers will have the choice with every transaction, whether they want to process it over the Interac network or the Visa network. But they wil

Finance committee  If you'll allow me a liberty for a moment, I think what I'm hearing behind a lot of these questions is a connection between the fees that merchants pay or interchange and Visa's profitability. I think we need to reiterate that Visa charges fees to acquirers and issuers for the se

Industry committee  We're planning to offer choice at multiple levels. The way our product is designed, Interac and Visa are on the same piece of plastic. Consumers will have the choice with every transaction, whether they want to process it over the Interac network or the Visa network. But they wil

Industry committee  If you'll allow me a liberty for a moment, I think what I'm hearing behind a lot of these questions is a connection between the fees that merchants pay or interchange and Visa's profitability. I think we need to reiterate that Visa charges fees to acquirers and issuers for the se

Finance committee  What we can disclose is that our profit up to the year 2006, I believe.... Or what I can say is that up to that point we were a not-for-profit. Visa Canada was a not-for-profit association. Our goal was to break even. In some years we made a little bit of money by accident; in ot

Finance committee  The risk of fraud associated with card theft is borne by the bank that issues the cards—and that's the same for debit as it is for credit.

Finance committee  The business model for Visa is that for every transaction that comes across the network, we get a click fee. There's also a portion of our revenue stream that comes from licensing fees, which banks pay us for the amount of volume that hits their card-issuing portfolio or hits the

Finance committee  One interesting statistic we can share is from a 2006 study done by the economics firm Global Insight. In that study they looked at growth in Canadian GDP from 1996 to 2006. They estimated that $122 billion of GDP was contributed by electronic payments, which represented 20% of t

Industry committee  What we can disclose is that our profit up to the year 2006, I believe.... Or what I can say is that up to that point we were a not-for-profit. Visa Canada was a not-for-profit association. Our goal was to break even. In some years we made a little bit of money by accident; in ot

Industry committee  The risk of fraud associated with card theft is borne by the bank that issues the cards—and that's the same for debit as it is for credit.

Industry committee  The business model for Visa is that for every transaction that comes across the network, we get a click fee. There's also a portion of our revenue stream that comes from licensing fees, which banks pay us for the amount of volume that hits their card-issuing portfolio or hits the

Industry committee  One interesting statistic we can share is from a 2006 study done by the economics firm Global Insight. In that study they looked at growth in Canadian GDP from 1996 to 2006. They estimated that $122 billion of GDP was contributed by electronic payments, which represented 20% of t

Finance committee  We think the system is working in some ways with the current debit products in Canada, but we think there are additional ways that consumers could use those cards. For example, they could use them online and when travelling around the world. We also think there is an issue with

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. It's not in our current plans to offer a preferential rate to members of the CFIB. It's something we could evaluate down the road. We always take into account what's happening in the market, the feedback we're hearing, and then incorporate that into f