Alfred F. Kelly
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Visa
Jennifer, thank you very much and good afternoon, everyone and thanks for joining us today. In the fourth quarter and throughout fiscal 2021, Visa has delivered strong results against the backdrop of economic uncertainty and the lingering impacts of the COVID pandemic. In doing so, we demonstrated the resiliency of our business and validated our growth strategy as we continue to drive the rapid growth of digital payments and enable innovation in money movement globally.
A quick summary of Q4 results. Fourth quarter payments volume was 121% of 2019, up about 0.8 points from Q3 and up 17% year-over-year. Despite the backdrop of a global pandemic, this quarter we also set a record with total global payments volume of $2.8 trillion. Cross border volume excluding Intra-Europe was 86% of 2019, 4 points better than Q3, and up 46% year-over-year. And process transactions were 124% of 2019, up 4 points from Q3, and up 21% year-over-year. Our net revenues grew 29% year-over-year and non-GAAP EPS was $1.62, up 44%.
In talking to many of you over the last few months, I know you're wondering what's ahead for Visa in the payments ecosystem as we emerge from the pandemic. So rather than doing my usual report card on the quarter, I'm going to speak more broadly today about the four key reasons why we believe that Visa is even better positioned for growth than before the pandemic. One, there's still enormous opportunity ahead in consumer payments Two, we continue to enhance our network of networks capability to facilitate money movement more seamlessly and securely for all players in the ecosystem and accelerate the penetration of new flows. Third, value-added services simultaneously, help our clients leverage our scale and sophistication while diversifying Visa's business and driving more volume. Four, we enable much of the disruption and innovation in the payments ecosystem which helps to accelerate Visa's growth.
So let me start with, number one, the enormous opportunity in consumer payments. We see that the pandemic has helped to further digitize cash. In the last 12 months, global debit cash volumes which are primarily the amount of cash withdrawn from Visa debit cards has increased 4% while debit payments volume has grown 23%, both on a constant dollar basis. In 2021, the number of monthly active e-commerce credentials and spend per active credential continued to grow strongly. For example, in the United States, monthly active credentials and active spend per credential both grew by more than 20% on average versus 2019.
We've grown credentials for both traditional and new players to $3.7 billion, up 7% year-over-year. After renewing client contracts that represented 55% of our payments volume in the previous two years, we renewed contracts that represented nearly 20% in 2021. Let me just highlight a few of those deals in Q4. In our Asia-Pacific region, we renewed three of Visa's top 20 issuers including China Merchants Bank and Bank of China. And in North America, we renewed three of the top 15 issuers. P&C renewed their prepaid consumer credit and debit, commercial credit and small business credit and debit portfolios. Regions also renewed the prepaid consumer credit and debit, commercial credit and small business credit and debit portfolios. And RBC and Visa have entered into a renewal of their agreement with respect to the issuance of credit, debit and prepaid cards in Canada.
Fintechs have also fueled our growth. In the last year, nearly 30% more fintechs issued Visa credentials and they have more than doubled their payments volume. Furthermore, fintechs are scaling. We've also grown acceptance to more than 80 million merchant locations up 14% year-over-year. And when you include small businesses behind players like Stripe and Square, the number is north of 100 million merchant locations. We've grown tap to pay to 70% of all face to face transactions globally. Excluding the United States, we have more than 70 countries with over 50% contactless penetration. US penetration is now over 15% more than double from just a year ago with 400 million cards, quadruple what we had two years ago.
We know from other markets that tapping brings increased spending and transactions while digitizing cash. We also continue to innovate, to make it easier for partners to access and utilize our platforms and capabilities. One recent example is Visa Cloud Connect which enables clients to connect to VisaNet via the cloud eliminating the need for investment in local datacenters, telecommunications infrastructure and specialized payment hardware.
To summarize, consumer payments is an opportunity and Visa's credentials, acceptance and innovation that make us feel confident about our ability to accelerate growth in the future. Moving now to our network of networks. We continue to enhance our capabilities to facilitate money movement seamlessly and securely for all players in the ecosystem, while accelerating the penetration of new flows. The total new flows opportunity is a $185 trillion payments infrastructure, regulations and settlement systems are all very local in nature, which creates a lot of complexity in a world of global trade. Our network of networks capability enabled Visa as a single connection point to help clients to move value domestically and cross-border over all networks including Visa's own networks, RTPs, ACHs and new networks in the future like stable clients and public blockchains.
In FY '21, we continue to build out Visa Direct's global reach surpassing 5 billion transactions across 500 programs, and nearly 550 enablers such as acquirers, processors, banks and fintechs. In the US alone, nearly 120 million cards have sent or received funds using Visa Direct. Visa Direct is unique as it is more -- has more endpoints and more use cases compared to the next competitor and offers flexible technology. Our growth plan for Visa Direct focuses on four key levers. First, in French existing use cases. P2P is our largest use case and in FY '21 we surpassed 200 P2P programs globally. Insurance disbursements is another use case and this quarter we added Nationwide to begin distributing claims.
Second, we want to capture the cross-border opportunity. For cross-border P2P during the fourth quarter, we added pay send and soon Western Union's US customers will be able to send funds to eligible Visa cards in the Philippines, Thailand, Colombia and Jamaica, followed by a robust expansion plan for other countries. The odd remittances were also leveraging our cross-border capabilities for marketplace, supplier payments, student tuition payments and more.
Our third lever to grow is scale the over 20 live use cases. Recent examples include tipping, fundraising, brokerage account funding and airline vouchers. And in the fourth quarter, we added Yardi [Phonetic] in the rental space area for property managers to distribute security deposits finally scale new markets. Visa directed scaled rapidly in several markets, but there are many more with the market conditions are right for acceleration. For example, in Peru, we have a strong P2P footprint and are now adding new use cases like the innovative payroll solution launched in partnership to [Indecipherable] of salary on demand provider that also seeks to improve financial inclusion. Globally, we have more than quadrupled the number of earned wage access providers on our platform since 2019. In short, we are just scratching the surface on Visa Direct and expect to drive rapid growth in the years ahead to capture the $65 trillion market opportunity.
We also have many examples of partners utilizing Visa Direct and our B2B capabilities. This quarter, we're pleased that BIM [Phonetic] will offer their 400,000 plus business customers, the ability to make B2B payments via Visa Direct and through Visa virtual cards. We also have wins with Credorax in Europe for travel, virtual cards in ignition [Phonetic] and Standard Bank in CEMEA in fleet [Phonetic] and an exclusive agreement for physical and virtual cards with ramp of P2P payouts, automation fintech here in the United States. We also continue to strengthen and expand our relationship with J.P. Morgan, commercial card through a new commercial card agreement and through J.P. Morgan's participation in Visa's Commercial Pay solution. These initiatives will support virtual card capability spur growth in new payment flows and drive incremental volume over time.
Visa B2B Connect now operates in more than 100 markets and offers a multilateral network with distributed ledger technology that addresses the pain points of existing solutions, which include transparency and speed. We're also pleased to have launched a partnership with Citi to be a global settlement bank for Visa B2B Connect which broadens the endpoints available for clients to include Citi's business accounts for moving money cross border and their clearing capabilities for banks that have not yet been integrated into the B2B Connect network. Given the size and breadth of Citi and our role in facilitating money movement, we're very excited about this capability to expand the Visa B2B Connect network.
Looking ahead, open banking plays an essential role in the network of networks. We believe Visa can accelerate the adoption of open banking in Europe with our pending acquisition of tank, together, we can provide a secure, reliable platform for innovation that could be expanded globally. Whether it's leveraging account data for value-added services or facilitating account to account or Pay by Bank money movement, open banking creates opportunities for Visa to offer our clients and partners a one-stop shop for money movement, security, data and valuable customer experiences. Blockchains also will continue to expand our network of networks. Our settlement capabilities and our continued innovation around crypto APIs and services have been key to winning new partnerships. We have nearly 60 crypto platform partners with the capability to issue Visa credentials and there we're already capturing over $3.5 billion of payment volume in FY '21. The third reason we're even better positioned for growth post COVID is value-added services, where our scale and sophistication simultaneously help our clients be more successful, while diversifying Visa's business and driving more value.
Our value-added solutions differentiate Visa's network, enable our clients to adapt to the changing payments ecosystem and deliver valuable services across other rails enhancing our network of network capabilities. In 2021, 40% of our clients used five or more value-added services and nearly 30% use 10 or more, which is up from 20% in 2020. Let me highlight a few services that have grown significantly in 2021. CyberSource added 28 new acquirer partners and 45,000 merchants as a result -- and as a result, we are growing payments volume twice as fast as our broader client base. And our risk to the dilution on CyberSource called decision manager grew over 30%.
We have doubled the number of tokens over the past year to 2.6 billion [Phonetic] and enhance the capability to manage them through Visa Cloud token. Across more than 8600 issuers and 800000 merchants, tokens have led to a 2.5% increase in approval rates and a 28% reduction in fraud rates. Visa debt authorization and Visa Risk Manager utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities which helped reduce fraud by $26 billion screening 30% more transactions in 2021 than in 2020. All of our efforts in authentication, risk, identity and authorization optimization have led to cross border card-not-present approval rates increasing by nearly 2% in the past year. Therefore, evaluated services revenue grew 25% in Q4 and also drove additional volume. Since the pandemic began, our VAS revenue has averaged a quarterly growth rate in the high teens and with approximately $5 billion in FY '21. Finally, the fourth reason that we believe we have great room to grow is that, we can enable much of the disruption in innovation in the payments ecosystem which helps accelerate Visa's growth. Visa's past, present and future are about fostering innovation in enabling new partners, capabilities and new cases.
We enable the disruptors. We help them scale. Disruptors are good for payments good for Visa. Given our role in the ecosystem, we don't pick winners and losers. And we're well positioned for growth across many potential outcomes. Let's take wallets as an example. Wallets have done a tremendous job of building a user base in some cases building acceptance. But at some point, they reached a point where they are seeking a digital growth and many of them are embedding Visa credentials in their wallet, so the consumer can use it anywhere Visa is accepted as well as receive and send cross border, P2P payments. LINE pays an excellent example with four portfolios totaling 5.6 million Visa credentials across three countries, including a new co-brand in Thailand that was launched in the fourth quarter.
Buy now pay later or BNPL is a newer example, but we think we'll have a similar outcome. While installments are fast growing, they're just a fraction of the total industries payment volume estimated to be about $100 billion to $150 billion. But we are bringing scale to disruptors. We have a two-pronged strategy where we provide a network solution as well as solutions for our BNPL fintech partners. The network solution offers issuers, the ability to extend installments to their existing credit clients and merchants to offer a seamless installment option to their customer with flexible terms.
We continue to expand our partnerships in Q4 with HSBC in Malaysia; Moneris, Canada's largest payment processor by volume; and ANZ in Australia with 2022 large volumes [Phonetic]. We also partnered with fintechs in a number of ways. We generate revenue as customers pay their instalments with a Visa card through virtual cards for B2B or consumer payments and through value-added services. The majority of the instalment pay-offs are on cards, today. For example in Canada over the last year, the number of Visa cards used to repay installments has grown more than 300%. We believe we're currently experiencing BNPL 1.0. Individual fintechs and companies are cutting individual deals, merchant by merchant.
Eventually, we believe the business model will evolve to be BNPL 2.0 with fintech partners issue Visa credentials to leverage our acceptance and platforms to overcome the difficulty of scaling acceptance globally merchant by merchant. We're already seeing this evolution begin to take shape. Just this quarter, Florida, signed a global brand deal to accelerate expansion that scale into several markets.
So to close, Visa is better positioned than before the pandemic to capture the opportunity ahead supported by the strong growth in consumer payments, the scale of our platforms, network and capabilities and new flows and value-added services becoming a greater portion of our revenue. And as cross border volumes return over the next few years, it will only help to further drive our growth. Furthermore, over the history of our company, we have demonstrated that our innovation willingness to partner and compelling and competitive offerings have made our business resilient and successful.
With that, I'll now turn it over to Vasant to review Q4 and also provide a view of what we believe these -- all these opportunities mean for Visa's financial performance in the coming year. Vasant, over to you.
