Located in the Eastern US, the 370,000 square foot data centre is designed to support multiple authorisation engines and process hundreds of millions of transactions each day. With more than 140,000 square feet of raised floor space, the centre is capable of handling more than 10,000 transaction messages per second.

The facility completes a global network of four data centres on three continents connecting more than 16,000 financial institutions, and millions of merchants and processing partners through more than 1600 network endpoints around the world.

The firm says that for the year ending 30 June, 2009, its total volume was nearly $4.3 trillion dollars and this is expected to grow as the world migrates away from cash and cheques and towards electronic payments, fuelled by new merchant acceptance locations, new products like mobile payments and prepaid, and new services like money transfer, and mobile alerts and notifications.

Visa now has two synchronized, secure and reliable data centres in North America, each capable of carrying its entire global payments volume in the event of a natural disaster or systems outage.

The new data centre began processing transactions immediately following Visa's annual "stress testing" of its network in an IBM facility.

In addition, the company has tapped the IBM System z Transaction Processing Facility to boost the processing power of its authorisation platform, the Visa Integrated Payment platform (VIP).

The 64-bit operating system allows more information to be manipulated at once and perform more complex processing functions in milliseconds, paving the way for information-intensive applications such as advanced fraud analysis, and mobile payments and services.

Mark Anzani, chief technology officer for System Z, IBM, says: "Visa has raised the standard for future transactions processing by tapping the reliability and security of the new Z10 mainframe and the power of the new z/TPF software to connect an ever-increasing number of merchants, banks and consumers."

The firm has also upgraded its global payment platform, as well as introducing a number of advanced processing capabilities as part of a semiannual software update.

Mike Dreyer, CIO, Visa, says: "Visa's commitment to continuous technology upgrades differentiates us from competitors and helps Visa play a key role in facilitating the migration to electronic payments. Few people recognise the critical role VisaNet plays in supporting our extensive brand acceptance, securing our products and facilitating payment innovation."