Earlier this year MasterCard gave notice that from this summer it plans to start charging a fee on 'staged' digital wallets such as PayPal, Google Wallet and Square.

According to Reuters, when asked yesterday if Visa was planning to follow suit, Scharf told the Barclays Emerging Payments Forum: "I think it is totally appropriate to do that."

MasterCard's planned fee is widely seen as designed to protect the firm's home turf as PayPal increasingly turns its attention from online commerce to the high street.

PayPal's parent eBay has suffered a four per cent dip in its share price so far this year, at least in part due to fears that the card outfits are "taking the gloves off," according to a recent note from Nomura Equity Research analysts Bill Carcache and Brian Nowak.

Yesterday Scharf confirmed that Visa is thinking along the same lines as its rival, saying: "Some of the people we compete with started out as one thing and they morph into another thing, and doing things online is very different than doing things at point of sale."

He added: "We are always thinking about those relationships and they have changed. And if they changed enough that we think it warrants us to change something with us, we will do that."

Visa CEO calls digital wallet fee on PayPal "appropriate" - Reuters