Visa Market Share - 52.6%
Amex Market Share - 19.6%

Visa Revenue 2022 - $29.3 B
Amex Revenue 2022 - $50.6 B

What is the secret of American Express?

Visa/Mastercard are card networks. Their main role is information sharing. When you swipe your card at a POS Machine, how does your credit card issuer know which merchant to transfer the money to?

Your card doesn’t individually maintain a record of all merchants who can accept credit cards.

Instead it ties up with a card network e.g. Visa/MasterCard. Any merchant that has Visa as a network service provider can accept payments from a Visa card.

When the merchant’s bank (acquiring bank) is registered on the card network, the network is completed. Card networks save banks the hassle of onboarding each merchant and maintaining the infrastructure.

Let us see how a typical credit card transaction works.

There are 3 steps - Authorization, authentication and settlement.