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Technology Stocks : CheckFree Holdings Corp. (CKFR), the next Dell, Intel? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: noiserider who wrote (19784)	9/4/2002 9:10:46 AM
From: StocksMan	Respond to of 20297

Visa's vision Forbes Magazine Tuesday September 3, 4:33 pm ET By Daniel Lyons The world's top credit card company now aims to rule all forms of electronic payments, even handling commercial purchases of up to $10 million. But first its computers need an overhaul. Swipe your Visa card at a store in Sydney and you trigger a pretty amazing sequence of events. The 16-digit account number stored in your card's magnetic stripe zooms across a leased phone line to the merchant's bank, zips under the Pacific to Visa's data center outside Tokyo and rides the Visa network to the data center of your issuing bank in Delaware. It authorizes the transaction and sends bits whizzing back, a 39,000-kilometer roundtrip journey that involves five stops plus a calculation of how much to charge the merchant in fees and how to divvy up those fees among the banks. Elapsed time: two seconds. Few systems on earth can do this. Visa can do it 4,000 times a second and did it 35 billion times last year, riffling through more transactions in an hour than all of the world's stock exchanges do in a day. Last year Visa pumped $2.3 trillion through its 15-million-kilometer matrix of fiber lines. In five years it has suffered only eight minutes of downtime, better than almost any other system on the planet. So why is Visa overhauling the whole shebang, at a cost of more than $200 million? Because technology is everything in the battle for control of consumers' wallets. Technology explains how Visa has gained so rapidly on printed paper money as a medium of exchange, and it will determine whether Visa can hold its own against newer forms. "Credit is boring. It's yesterday's news," says Carl Pascarella, the CEO of Visa USA. "Our goal now is to displace cash and checks. We're not a credit card company; we're an electronic-payment company. . ." biz.yahoo.com