Looking for credit card usage patterns in Latin America, including
- Accounts in Force and Cards in Force by country
- Total spend by country
- Card user demographics by country
- Historical trends
- Market share between card issuers (i.e. AmEx/Visa/MC)

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 24 Jul 2004 14:39 PDT

jswift-ga,


From what I can tell, Visa is the major card in use throughout most of
Latin American (and the world!).  I found stats for Visa cards in
Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico for:

--number of cards in use

--number of annual transactions

--total annual sales volume in US dollars

--number of ATMs accepting Visa cards


This is obviously not everything you asked for.  But it is the
information that seems to be publicly available, without purchasing
very high-priced market study reports.

If this information is of interest to you, you may want to consider
re-pricing your question to reflect the value of this partial
information.

Let me know your thoughts on this.


pafalafa-ga

---

Clarification of Question by jswift-ga on 28 Jul 2004 09:58 PDT

OK. I will accept that info for $50.

jswift-ga,


Hello again.

Thanks for getting back to me.  I think you'll find the information
below quite useful and revealing.  I have tried to consolidate it, and
present it clearly.

Before rating this answer, however, please let me know if anything is
unclear, or if you need additional information.  Just post a Request
for Clarification, and let me know how I can help you further.

All the best, 

pafalafa-ga

==========

Visa's corporate homepage for their Latin American operations is at:


http://www.visalatam.com/e_index.jsp


Note that you can select the Spanish version of the page in the upper
left hand corner, if you so desire.

Along the yellow/orange bar in the center of the page is some text
that says "About Visa".  Hovering your mouse over this text brings up
sub-menus, including "Corporate Information" and "Press Room".  Each
of these areas has there own sub-menus as well, and it is these that
provide the information below.


From the "About Visa" page at:


http://www.visalatam.com/e_aboutvisa/acerca_actualidad.jsp


we can confirm that "Visa is the leading payment system worldwide".  


Clicking on "The Latin America and Caribbean Region" link leads to:



http://www.visalatam.com/e_aboutvisa/acerca_region.jsp


"From Miami, Visa LAC serves over 44 countries and territories, with
subregional offices in São Paulo, Brazil; Caracas, Venezuela; Mexico
City, Mexico; and Santiago de Chile, Chile."


Under "About Visa" on this page, I then selected the "Press Room" sub-menu:


http://www.visalatam.com/press_release/e_media/press/main.jsp


This page is a source of a lot of useful information, containing press
releases with descriptions of the growth of the use of Visa cards in
the region, the percent of personal expenses handled by credit card,
use of Visa for e-commerce, etc.  You may want to do a bit of
exploring here.

From the press room, I selected "Fact Sheets":


http://www.visalatam.com/e_aboutvisa/prensa_info.jsp


which offers the following information:

--Visa LAC has more than 300 employees in 5 regional offices.

--Visa has a global market share of the credit card business of 58% in
2001, while their LAC market share was 53%.

--Globally, Visa has issued 1 billion cards, with annual sales volume
of $2.4 trillion, via 35 billion transactions in a network of 24
million locations accepting Visa cards, and 800,000 ATM's (whew!).

--In the Latin America/Caribbean area, the figures (probably for 2001)
are:  130 million Visa cards; $175 billion in sales; 2.8 billion
transactions; 2 million merchants and 58,000 ATM's.



Visa LAC maintains a "Statistics" page where you can obtain additional
information on LAC in general, and for individual countries:


http://www.visalatam.com/e_aboutvisa/estadisticas.jsp
 

Note that the LAC statistics here have been updated through March
2004, so they are considerably more current than the prior statistics.

In 2004 for the LAC area, Visa had:

--152 million cards
--3.7 billion transactions
--$194 billion annual sales

Individual country statistics for 2004 are available for four countries:

Argentina:

Cards -- 11 million 
Transactions --  330 million 
Sales Volume -- $ 15 billion 
 ATMs -- 6,581 

===========

Brazil:

Cards -- 93 million 
 Transactions -- 2 billion 
 Sales Volume -- $ 80 billion 
 ATMs -- 19,938 

==========

Chile:

Cards -- 2.6 million 
Transactions -- 83 million 
Sales Volume -- $ 4.8 billion 
 ATMs -- 2,626 

==========

Mexico:

Cards -- 27 million 
Transactions -- 854 million 
Sales Volume -- $ 69 billion 
 ATMs -- 19,747 


==========


Again, let me know if there is anything I can do to clarify the
information I've provided here.


pafalafa-ga


search strategy:  Google search on: [international credit card statistics]

Nice work. Thanks.

Thanks very much...appreciate the stars!

paf