The platform is designed specifically to meet European requirements, such as the Single Euro Payments Area (Sepa). It has taken six years to complete the migration and has required the creation of an 800 plus person technology and customer services team.

Visa says the system can handle 2500 transactions a second at average speeds of around 20 milliseconds a go, making it nearly seven times as fast as rival MasterCard.

To ensure resilience there are two identical systems spanning 10,000 square-feet across two data centres and in the last three years Visa claims to have delivered 100% availability and 99.999% service quality.

The company says that the new platform's efficiency in handling ever increasing processing volumes saves its members - which own and control the system - significant amounts.

Steve Chambers, CIO, Visa Europe, says: "We've created an inter-bank processing service without equal in Europe. We've developed it using open system technology delivering incredible scale, processing efficiency and unparalleled resiliency. It can handle cross-border and domestic market processing services with low costs and high reliability."