To help readers understand the content better, the following terms and glossaries have been provided.
Payments Volume: At its simplest, payments volume is the total dollar amount of all transactions successfully processed over a credit card company’s network during a specific timeframe.
When you buy a $5 latte, rent a $500 car, or pay a $2,000 tuition bill with a card, those exact dollar amounts are bundled together with billions of other transactions to form the company’s total payments volume.
However, “Big Three” card networks calculate and talk about this number slightly differently based on their business models.
1. Visa & Mastercard (The Open Loop Networks)
Visa and Mastercard don’t actually issue credit cards or lend money. They are strictly tech networks connecting banks. Because of this, they break their volume down into two distinct categories:
Payments Volume (The Core Metric): This includes the total monetary value of purchases made with cards bearing their logo (e.g., buying groceries, shopping online, paying for dinner). This is the number that drives their service revenues.
Cash Volume: This tracks money moving out of the system, like ATM withdrawals or cash advances.
Gross Dollars Volume (GDV): This is the grand total when you combine Payments Volume and Cash Volume together.
2. American Express (The Closed Loop Network)
American Express acts as both the tech network and the bank issuing the card. Because they actually lend the money and manage the cardholder relationship directly, they use slightly different terminology in their financial reports:
Network Volume: This is Amex’s equivalent to Visa/Mastercard’s payments volume. It is the total dollar amount of all purchases made on the Amex network globally.
Billed Business: This is a subset of network volume. It refers specifically to the transactions made by cards issued directly by American Express itself (like your standard Amex Gold or Platinum card), rather than cards issued by third-party bank partners.
Why this number is the “Holy Grail” metric
Payments volume is widely considered the most important health metric for a credit card company for three reasons:
Revenue Generation: Card networks make their money by taking a tiny percentage cut (often fractions of a percent) of every single transaction. If payments volume goes up, transaction fees and revenue naturally go up.
Economic Indicator: Because these three companies handle trillions of dollars in transactions, their collective payments volume acts as a real-time pulse on global consumer spending and economic health.
Scale and Moat: Higher volume gives a network more leverage to negotiate with giant retailers and heavily invest in fraud prevention, making it incredibly difficult for new competitors to break into the space.
Nominal Payments Volume: When diving into the financials of credit card giants like Visa, Mastercard, or American Express, you will often run into terms like payments volume and nominal payments volume.
While they sound almost identical, the difference boils down to how they handle foreign exchange (FX) fluctuations.
1. Payments Volume (Constant Dollars)
When a credit card company reports just “Payments Volume” (often adjusted or referred to as constant-dollar payments volume), they are stripping out the chaotic swings of the currency exchange market to show you how the business is actually growing.
The Method: They convert local currency transactions from both the current period and the prior period using a set, historic exchange rate (usually the rate from the previous year).
The Purpose: It measures organic growth. It answers the question: “Are people actually buying more stuff on our cards, regardless of what the US Dollar is doing against the Euro or Yen?”
2. Nominal Payments Volume (Current Dollars)
“Nominal” means “in name only” or “as stated.” Nominal payments volume (often called current-dollar payments volume) is the raw, unadjusted total of all transactions.
The Method: They convert local currency transactions into the reporting currency (usually USD) using the actual exchange rates in effect at the time of the transaction.
The Purpose: It reflects absolute, real-world dollars at that exact moment in time. This is the figure used to calculate the actual revenue hitting the company’s financial statements.
Why Do Investors Care?
Credit card networks use both metrics to tell two different sides of the same story:
Look at Payments Volume (Constant) to see if the network is successfully gaining market share, signing up more merchants, and getting consumers to swipe more often.
Look at Nominal Payments Volume to see the actual pool of money available for the company to take its percentage cut (revenue generation). If nominal volume drops due to a strong dollar, the company’s actual revenue in that region will likely take a hit too.
Insight & Summary of Visa’s Payments Volume against Major Peers
The following analysis consolidates the trends observed across Visa Inc.’s payments volume against major peers for the 2015–2024 period.
Visa: The Undisputed Volume Leader at Scale Visa’s payments volume expanded from $6,843B (2015) to $13,433B (2024), a near-doubling over nine years at a 7.8% CAGR. The scale differential is substantial: at $13,433B in 2024, Visa processes 56.5% of all payments volume across this five-company peer group, and its absolute volume is 1.7x that of Mastercard — the closest competitor. The only meaningful interruption occurred in 2020 (-0.3%), which proved transient: the 2021 rebound of +22.3% recovered the lost ground decisively and established a new growth trajectory that has sustained through 2024. The 2022–2024 average of $12,574B marks a structural step-change from the pre-pandemic baseline of approximately $8,400B–$9,000B, reflecting the accelerated global shift toward cashless payments and the normalisation of cross-border travel volumes following the pandemic suppression.
Mastercard: Faster Growth, Persistent Volume Gap Mastercard has been the most dynamic performer on a relative growth basis — 10.1% CAGR from $3,360B (2015) to $8,014B (2024), outpacing Visa’s 7.8% CAGR over the same period. Despite this outperformance, the absolute gap versus Visa has actually widened: the spread between Visa and Mastercard volume was approximately $3,483B in 2015 and expanded to $5,419B by 2024. Mastercard’s share of the peer group’s combined volume stood at 33.7% in 2024 — meaningfully behind Visa but well ahead of all other peers. The 2022–2024 average of $7,309B confirms Mastercard’s position as a structurally growing platform, though bridging the volume gap to Visa in absolute terms would require a sustained and significant differential in network growth rates that the current trajectory does not yet indicate.
American Express: Premium Positioning With Cyclical Sensitivity American Express processed $1,750B in 2024, growing from $1,028B in 2015 at a 6.1% CAGR — the second-slowest absolute growth rate in the group. The AmEx model’s premium positioning — centered on high-income cardholders, travel, and business spending — creates stronger unit economics per dollar of volume than mass-market networks, but introduces meaningful cyclical sensitivity: the 2020 contraction of -18.0% (to $1,005B) was by far the deepest among all peers as travel and entertainment spending collapsed, compared to Visa’s near-flat 2020 performance. The recovery has been strong, however — AmEx reached $1,750B in 2024 (+43% from the 2020 trough), demonstrating the loyalty and spending resilience of its cardholder base. At 7.4% of peer group volume, AmEx is structurally a niche player in terms of absolute payments flow, but its business model is not primarily volume-optimised — fee income and spend-intensity per card are the relevant metrics for evaluating AmEx’s competitive standing.
JCB and Diners Club/Discover: Scale-Constrained with Limited Momentum JCB and Diners Club/Discover each occupy the lower end of the volume spectrum — $319B and $253B respectively in 2024 — representing 1.3% and 1.1% of peer group volume. Both experienced pandemic-related contractions (JCB: $308B → $325B recovery; Diners: -7.3% in 2020) and have grown at the slowest CAGRs in the group (JCB: 5.3%, Diners: 6.5%). JCB’s geographic concentration in Japan and select Asian markets creates both a ceiling on organic growth and vulnerability to currency and macro dynamics in its core markets. Diners Club/Discover’s 2024 volume of $253B actually declined slightly from $256B in 2023 — the only year-over-year contraction among all peers — suggesting volume plateaus may be emerging. Neither network has demonstrated a credible pathway to closing the gap with the top-tier players in this dataset.
Structural Takeaway: The volume hierarchy in this dataset has been stable throughout the period: Visa dominant, Mastercard structurally second, American Express a distant but strategically distinct third, and JCB and Diners operating at subscale. The most consequential dynamic is Mastercard’s consistently faster organic growth rate relative to Visa — if sustained at the current differential, it implies a slow but observable convergence over a multi-decade horizon. For the near-to-medium term, however, Visa’s structural advantages — breadth of issuer relationships, geographic penetration, cross-border rails infrastructure, and network effects from its scale — remain deeply entrenched, and the 2022–2024 average volume of $12,574B against Mastercard’s $7,309B illustrates the magnitude of the lead that any challenger would need to overcome.
The table below combines all key payments volume metrics into a single view for the latest three fiscal years.
Payments Volume ($B): Visa vs American Express, Diners Club/Discover, JCB, and Mastercard
* Payments volume data are reported based on calendar year.
* American Express, Diners Club / Discover, JCB and Mastercard data sourced from The Nilson Report issue 1288 (June 2025). Includes all consumer, small business and commercial credit, debit and prepaid cards for Visa and Mastercard and includes all consumer, small business and commercial credit cards, including business from third-party issuers, for American Express, Diners Club / Discover, and JCB. JCB figures include other payment-related products and some figures are estimates. Mastercard excludes Maestro and Cirrus figures.
* Visa’s fiscal year begins on Oct 1 and ends on Sept 30.
Payments Volume Growth (%): Visa vs American Express, Diners Club/Discover, JCB, and Mastercard
* Payments volume data are reported based on calendar year.
* American Express, Diners Club / Discover, JCB and Mastercard data sourced from The Nilson Report issue 1288 (June 2025). Includes all consumer, small business and commercial credit, debit and prepaid cards for Visa and Mastercard and includes all consumer, small business and commercial credit cards, including business from third-party issuers, for American Express, Diners Club / Discover, and JCB. JCB figures include other payment-related products and some figures are estimates. Mastercard excludes Maestro and Cirrus figures.
* Visa’s fiscal year begins on Oct 1 and ends on Sept 30.
1. All financial figures presented were obtained and referenced from Visa Inc.’s quarterly and annual reports published on the company’s investor relations page: Visa Inc. Investor Relations.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist us in writing some of the text in this article. However, the data is directly obtained from original sources (usually the quarterly and annual reports) and meticulously cross-checked by our editors multiple times to ensure its accuracy and reliability.
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