Visa Inc.VBUYJun 23, 2023Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Sep 04, 2026. Market Open.
Visa and Mastercard have been treading water the past year because the market has been fixated on AI, but that money has been rotating out of AI into places like credit cards. The two companies have some of the best business models, big moats and trading at attractive PEs, though neither are at decades-long low PEs. Visa's layoff of 7% of workforce is good for the stock. Probably AI is making Visa more productive.
Mastercard and Visa have been weak because cash-to-card conversion has historically been the easiest thing for them to do but is now over. Value-added services are instead driving more growth. Agentic AI traffic is about to go parabolic, so can the cards play the role of authentication layer? He thinks so, and they should. Stablecoins and peer-to-peer transactions are not big deals, not major threats.
Both are phenomenal businesses. Comparable on valuation and share price performance. If you own one, don't switch.
His clients own Visa, and have for a very long time. Makes the most sense for him as more payments become digitized and V captures more market share. It's the largest payment network, so its profitability is a bit higher on margins. Bit north of 20x PE, FCF yield north of 4%. Attractive valuation for an essential business.
We don't have a 'internal thesis' on Visa, but the general thesis is that a large amount of transactions done need to go through the 'infrastructure' of either Visa or Mastercard. Also, companies need to accept these cards because not doing so could mean that customers are unable to actually buy good/services from that store. So, they also have some scale advantages due to their market share.
Fundamentally, they are very solid with 50%+ net margins and tend to grow the top-line at a consistent 10% annually. At 24X forward P/E, the shares might not be 'cheap' but we don't think it looks like an egregious valuation either.
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