Visa in talks over $20bn Visa Europe acquisition - Bloomberg

The reason Visa Europe brought in the new CEO was to sell the company back to Visa Inc. when asked several times his answer was "every company is for sale and we should be proud they want to buy us". A fair comment for someone who would likely gain upwards of €50m when the sale goes though. What is amazing is this was meant to have happened during the world cup in South Africa in 2010 and then during the 2010 games in London. At that time the price was around $7billion. Clearly shows thy at visa Inc isn't very good at negotiations but Visa Europe are. On a positive note it must be sickening for Messers Mariano, Steve and Phillipe all of whom were EVPs. They were unceremoniously discarded during the reshuffle a year ago. They were waiting for that payoff. Alas what goes around, comes around. I would say that there is an 95% chance this will go ahead. The buzz in the Viaa Europe canteen is at new heights as we await stock options. Ker ching!

If this acquisition went ahead, merchants could be exposed to a US-style myriad of ever increasing scheme fees while Visa enjoys a constantly rising share price. I have written about the potential implications in further detail on a Finextra Blog here.

I agree wholeheartedly with Alistair on this one and think his Blog is spot on. I don't think this acquisition would be good for merchants in Europe at all. Time will tell I guess, but merchants should prepare themselves for Visa Scheme fee increases in the future.

There is a riposte that all European governments should apply to Visa Inc. before this humongous sale of around 20 Billion euros goes through and some executives at Visa will pop the Champaign cork, having won the lottery so to speak. And that is for all European governments to wake the fuck up and apply a Europe-wide regulatory regime to severely limit or completely eliminate all interchange fees on European merchants, and their flow-on effects of credit and debit card surcharges that are above the cash price in retail outlets, that all card holders will most definitely pay to merchants so that they may cover costs imposed by the likes of Visa Inc. and MasterCard on merchants everywhere.  

 http://www.euractiv.com/euro-finance/verschueren-lower-interchange-fe-interview-533664        

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee