Visa sees travel to the US picking up with the dollar weakening
At Visa, cross-border volumes climbed 11% in its fiscal first quarter, which ended Dec.31
New York: Visa is seeing a pickup in travel to the US with the dollar weakening against other major currencies in recent weeks.
In contrast with countries across Europe and Latin America, travel into the US remains below pre-pandemic levels, Visa Chief Financial Officer Vasant Prabhu said in an interview Friday with Bloomberg Television. But such travel has ticked up as the value of the dollar has declined, he said.
“We are anticipating the cross-border business continuing to recover this year,” Prabhu said. “We think there’s a ton of pent-up demand.”
For Visa and rival Mastercard, overseas spending is a key metric, with such transactions typically more lucrative to the firms than purely domestic spending.
At Visa, cross-border volumes climbed 11 per cent in its fiscal first quarter, which ended December 31. That was the lowest level in at least five quarters and fell short of the 15 per cent growth analysts in a Bloomberg survey expected.
Still, executives have pointed to the fact that large swaths of Asia, including China, have largely remained shut until recently. As those lockdowns end, the company is expecting a boost in demand.
“There’s so much pent-up demand from many years of people postponing travel,” Prabhu said. “There’s more demand than there is airline capacity on some of these routes.”
The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, which tracks the performance of the greenback against a basket of major global currencies, has declined 1.9 per cent since the start of the year.