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>> How many transactions does Visa handle daily?
>> Daily, it varies. We actually run anywhere 300 million plus. It depends on what we call peak season. Peak season is traditionally the time right after Thanksgiving in the United States through after the New Year. That has actually been elongated now, given the advent of prepaid gift cards. So there's a new product that has actually taken what we had as a traditional peak season and actually move that into the January time frame as consumers go out and utilize the cards to procure goods and services.
>> And what are the IT challenges of handling that volume as well as during the peak periods.
>> Well, it's a continuous process improvement. We look at it from a year. So as we go into the January time frame, we'll actually do a decomposition of what happened during that peak season. We will look at, you know, how many transactions were handled around the world and what we did. We'll actually have a stress test, if you will, in July, where we actually test our systems with a new configuration and see how many transactions we had and what we can handle up to. For example, last year, we processed approximately 7400 transactions per second at peak. And what that is measured at is that it's measured at a sustained volume for over an hour. So usually it happens the day before or two days before the U.S. Christmastime, if you will; and we can actually configure our system and have, for 10,000, we actually have done tests that have run that up as high as 15,000. So we have tremendous amount of head room to handle unique transactions, whether it's information or loyalty or so forth.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
