To help readers understand the content better, the following terms and glossaries have been provided.
Total Volume: Total Volume is the absolute, all-inclusive financial metric used by credit card companies to measure the entire pool of money moving through their systems.
While payments volume only tracks the buying of goods and services (like retail shopping or restaurant bills), Total Volume layer on every single type of monetary movement allowed on a card.
The formula used by the industry is straightforward:
To understand Total Volume, you have to look closely at what constitutes that secondary piece of the puzzle: Cash Volume. This includes:
ATM Withdrawals: When a cardholder uses their credit or debit card to pull physical cash out of a machine.
Cash Advances: Over-the-counter cash requests made at a bank teller using a credit card line.
Balance Transfers: Moving debt from a competitor’s credit card over to the current card network.
Convenience Checks: Physical checks linked to a credit card account used to pay for things where cards aren’t accepted.
How the Big Three Define It
Because of their differing business setups, each company frames this absolute total slightly differently in their financial reporting:
1. Visa Inc.
Visa explicitly uses the phrase Total Volume in its SEC filings and annual reports. They define it exactly as the sum of payments volume (purchases) plus cash volume (ATM pulls and balance transfers) across all Visa-branded credentials.
2. Mastercard
Mastercard uses a slightly different term for the exact same concept: Gross Dollar Volume (GDV). When analysts look at Mastercard’s GDV, they are looking at the total value of all processed and non-processed volume, meaning both everyday retail commerce and cash-access transactions are combined into one giant bucket.
3. American Express (Amex)
Amex operates a “closed-loop” network where they act as the bank, meaning their focus is heavily weighted toward merchant purchases rather than ATM cash access. They track Network Volume, which represents the total velocity of money moving across the network, but their holy grail metric is usually Billed Business (spending exclusively driven by Amex-issued cards). Because Amex actively discourages using their premium cards for cash access by charging massive fees, cash volume makes up a tiny fraction of their total network volume compared to Visa or Mastercard.
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 Total Volume against Major Peers
The following analysis consolidates the trends observed across Visa Inc.’s total volume against major peers for the 2015–2024 period.
Visa: Dominant Scale with Moderating Growth Visa’s total volume — which includes both payments volume and cash volume — expanded from $9,905B (2015) to $15,927B (2024), a 60.8% cumulative increase at a 5.4% CAGR. As with payments volume, Visa commands the peer group’s combined total by a wide margin: at 56.8% share of the five-company aggregate in 2024, its volume is 1.6x that of Mastercard. The 2020 contraction of -3.2% was the sharpest single disruption in the dataset for Visa, reflecting pandemic suppression of cross-border and travel-related spend; the 2021 recovery (+18.7%) fully reversed the prior-year decline. More recently, the FY2022–2024 growth trend has normalised to a 5–7% range — Visa’s 2022–2024 average growth of 5.6% reflects a maturing volume base where structural payment network expansion is partially offset by market saturation in developed economies and the shift away from cash (which reduces the cash volume component of total volume over time). The 2024 volume of $15,927B is effectively a post-pandemic trajectory continuation rather than a new acceleration phase.
Mastercard: Consistently Outpacing Visa on Growth Mastercard’s total volume grew from $4,564B (2015) to $9,757B (2024) at a 8.8% CAGR — the fastest of all five peers and a clear structural outperformance relative to Visa’s 5.4%. The 2022–2024 average growth of 8.1% continues this differential, with the trend most visible in the post-pandemic recovery: Mastercard’s 2021 surge of +21.9% tracked closely with Visa (+18.7%), and its subsequent normalisation has held higher at 5.9%–10.4% versus Visa’s 4.4%–7.1%. Despite this consistent growth premium, the absolute volume gap has widened in dollar terms: the spread between Visa and Mastercard was $5,341B in 2015 and expanded to $6,170B by 2024 — Mastercard’s faster growth rate compounds off a meaningfully smaller base. At 34.8% of peer group volume in 2024, Mastercard’s share is growing gradually but the magnitude of catch-up required to challenge Visa’s network primacy remains significant on any near-to-medium term horizon.
American Express: Premium Resilience with Cyclical Sensitivity American Express’s total volume grew from $1,040B (2015) to $1,765B (2024) at a 6.1% CAGR — modestly above Visa and in line with Diners. The 2020 contraction of -18.5% was by far the most severe in the peer group, a direct consequence of AmEx’s premium travel-and-entertainment cardholder concentration; no other peer came close to this degree of pandemic impact. The subsequent recovery was correspondingly sharp: +27.0% in 2021, the strongest rebound in the group. The 2022–2024 average growth of 11.4% — the highest three-year average of any peer — reflects this ongoing normalization from the pandemic trough combined with strong underlying cardholder engagement in premium spend categories. At 6.3% of peer group volume, AmEx remains a strategically distinct network whose competitive moat is unit economics and cardholder quality rather than volume scale.
JCB: Stagnation and Structural Underperformance JCB presents the weakest growth trajectory in the dataset — a 5.2% CAGR from $207B (2015) to $327B (2024), with a 2022–2024 average growth of -0.8%, the only network recording negative average growth over that period. After solid earlier growth (+16.4% in 2016, +11.5% in 2018), JCB’s expansion has stalled: volumes were essentially flat in 2022 (-4.5%), 2023 (+2.8%), and 2024 (-0.6%), with the 2024 volume of $327B marginally below 2022’s $329B peak. JCB’s geographic concentration in Japan — an economy with structural demographic headwinds and a well-penetrated but slowly growing consumer payment market — creates a ceiling on organic expansion that is difficult to overcome without significant international acceptance network investment. At 1.2% of peer group volume, JCB is a structurally constrained participant.
Diners Club/Discover: Modest Growth Ending in Contraction Diners Club/Discover grew from $154B (2015) to a peak of $272B (2023) before contracting to $266B in 2024 (-2.2%), the first year-over-year decline since 2020. The 2022–2024 average growth of 7.0% is somewhat misleading given the endpoint contraction; the underlying trend suggests the network may be approaching volume saturation at its current scale and acceptance footprint. At 0.9% of peer group volume, Diners operates well below the threshold at which network effects generate meaningful competitive differentiation or pricing power with merchants and issuers.
Structural Takeaway: The total volume dataset confirms the same hierarchy as payments volume — Visa dominant, Mastercard growing faster, AmEx a premium niche, JCB and Diners subscale — with the additional signal that cash volume trends (the incremental component of total versus payments volume) are gradually becoming less significant as the global payments ecosystem demonetises. The 2022–2024 average growth differential between Mastercard (8.1%) and Visa (5.6%) is the most strategically consequential data point: sustained over a decade-plus horizon, it implies a slow but directionally consistent convergence in relative market position. For the near term, however, Visa’s absolute volume advantage ($15,050B average vs Mastercard’s $8,988B), combined with its network infrastructure depth, maintains an entrenched competitive position that no single peer is positioned to meaningfully challenge.
The table below combines all key total volume metrics into a single view for the latest three fiscal years.
Total Volume ($B): Visa vs American Express, Diners Club/Discover, JCB, and Mastercard
* Total volume data are reported based on calendar year.
* Total volume is the sum of payments volume and cash volume. Cash volume generally consists of cash access transactions, balance access transactions, balance transfers and convenience checks.
* 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.
You may find more information about total volume and payments volume here: total volume and payments volume.
Total Volume vs. Peers ($ Billions) — Averages (2022–2024)
Total Volume Growth (%): Visa vs American Express, Diners Club/Discover, JCB, and Mastercard
* Total volume data are reported based on calendar year.
* Total volume is the sum of payments volume and cash volume. Cash volume generally consists of cash access transactions, balance access transactions, balance transfers and convenience checks.
* 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.
You may find more information about total volume and payments volume here: total volume and payments volume.
Total Volume Growth vs. Peers (%) — Averages (2022–2024)
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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