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VisaNet, the largest payment processing system in the world, passed a rigorous stress test this week that ensures it can sustain a peak of more than 6,000 transaction messages per second this holiday season. The test, the largest of its kind, assures member financial institutions, cardholders and merchants that Visa can deliver secure and reliable payments - even during the busiest shopping days of the year. The test system included five high-performance computer systems, 65 Terabytes of disk storage, and 2 Gigabyte router capacity, making it the most complex, high volume payment system tested in a lab environment. Visa engineers fed the system one week's worth of actual transactions, captured at an earlier time and fed at various rates to the test system. They monitored the system's performance on a large screen in a "control room" onsite. "People aren't just using their payment cards more often, they're also expecting more from the cards they use, like rewards and security protections," said Carl Pascarella, president and CEO, Visa USA. "These changes in consumer payments mean we have to be vigilant in our preparations each year, making sure our network can handle more services and more volume without sacrificing any of our reliability." The stress test assumes a 20 percent increase in transaction volume this holiday season, based on Visa's global volume projections, increased consumer confidence and the results of a retailer expectations survey conducted by Visa USA in early July. The survey data, gathered from interviews with retail store managers, shows 82 percent of merchants are optimistic about the 2004 holiday shopping season and 72 percent of merchants expect an average increase of 22 percent in holiday sales volume. Visa expects significant growth in the use of Visa debit cards for holiday shopping, in keeping with the explosive growth in debit as a payment method of choice for millions of Americans. The company also expects increased volume among pre-paid cards, such as the Visa gift card. "No matter how many transactions come through our systems, our cardholders, merchants and Member banks have the same high performance expectations," said John Partridge, president of Inovant, Visa's IT organization responsible for the global payment network. "One of the major reasons Visa remains the best way to pay and be paid is our technology. No other payment system comes close to being able to do what we can do, on the scale at which we do it." Visa's stress test is conducted annually to ensure that Visa is ready to meet the needs of merchants during an important time of year for them. For many merchants, the holiday period represents the single largest volume period annually, and can make or break their year. Visa's systems capabilities -- including its direct connections to many large national chain merchants -- play an important role in merchants' holiday operations by offering a stable and reliable payment infrastructure. Additionally, Visa's investment in processing allows for a greater number of transactions per second, which translates into faster and more convenient checkouts at the merchant point of sale. According to Visa's survey, 45 percent believe the percentage of credit and debit transactions will increase during this upcoming holiday shopping period. At the same time, the Consumer Confidence Index rose by eight points in June, reaching its highest level in two years, further fueling the expectation of a significant increase in holiday sales. "This is a critical time for merchants and consumers. The last thing either wants during the holidays is a delay in their payment process. This test gives us the opportunity to test changes in our systems in a high-transaction environment to make sure they can stand up to the rigors of holiday volume," said Partridge. "Cardholders may never think about VisaNet, simply because paying with Visa cards is easy and it works. But there's nothing simple about the system behind those cards, nor easy about keeping it running. Investing in these annual tests is a vital part of keeping our system reliable and secure." Visa engineers conducted the annual test on a full model of VisaNet that assumes the model must handle all of Visa's expected traffic, without the help of the redundant data centers Visa employs around the world. The test bed was built at an IBM technology lab outside Washington, D.C., which handles the most demanding needs of large computing applications. The stress test is conducted in July to allow time to make any needed modifications to VisaNet before the peak transaction period, which runs from November 17th through December 31st. With the explosive growth in credit and debit payments, the stress test of VisaNet is designed to ensure sufficient capacity levels in a payment system that processes not only Visa debit and credit payments, but also has the ability to stand-in for other processors and banks during peak processing periods. Visa's telephone survey of retailers was conducted between June 30 and July 6, 2004 among 500 retail managers nationwide, representing a cross section of SIC categories. The margin of error is +/- 4.4 percent.