Growth in volume driven by a rebound in travel and a better global economic scenario helped the largest payment processor of the world, Visa Inc, to report a quarterly profit that surpassed Wall Street projections.

Despite this Visa said that the level of cross-border travel was still much lower than the levels from before the pandemic for the quarter as regions such as the Asia Pacific are still closed to travel because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Our business has been on a recovery track for the past three to four quarters. However, we are not back to normal yet globally,” Chief Financial Officer Vasant Prabhu told analysts on a call.

“The timing of reopening in key countries across Asia, both domestically and for cross-border travel is a key variable.”

At the same time, even while there was a pickup in in-store buying and a rebound in credit card usage volumes, the activities in the usage of debit and e-commerce outperformed paced in the quarter, which demonstrated resilience in the payments industry.

For the quarter, the net income of Visa increased to $1.65 per Class A share in the fourth quarter ended Sept. 30, which exceeded analysts’ expectations of $1.54 per share according to Refinitiv data.

The broad desire for vacation and shopping was generated during the quarter among consumers in the United States because of the reopening economies, as consumers moved outdoors in numbers after being confined indoors for more than 18 months.

According to Visa, travel between the United States and Mexico also remained strong during the quarter.

The company expects net revenue growth in the high teens in the first quarter of fiscal 2022, while total cross-border volume increased 38 per cent on a constant dollar basis in the reported quarter.

Visa expects the rebound in cross-border travel to continue through fiscal 2022 and approach 2019 levels in the summer of 2023, according to its internal planning assumptions as discussed by the company.

On a constant-dollar basis, there was an increase of 17 per cent in total payment volumes for the quarter, while there was a 21 per cent rise in the number of Visa transactions completed to 45.3 billion.

Last week, American Express’s profit beat expectations, thanks to increased card usage fueling a solid recovery in overall expenditure.

(Adapted from TheGlobeAndMail.com)