Visa Earnings Call Nuggets: New CEO and Operating Margin Guidance

On Wednesday, Visa (NYSE:V) reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call. Take a look.

New CEO

Robert Napoli – William Blair: I had question on your new CEO starting tomorrow, Charlie. I guess what led you to Charlie Scharf? I mean this is a dynamic type technology business, international growth. Charlie is everything we can tell is a very strong executive, but more of a U.S. bank guy. What were the key choices in selecting Charlie and going outside the Company today versus internal?

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Joseph W. Saunders – Chairman and CEO: As I mentioned in my comments today, he’s a dynamic executive, he’s done very well, he understands our business, he’s been a client, he’s been on our Board. If you remember, he was on the Board of this Company for three years. He has more than a fleeting familiarity with Visa. He is very familiar with the staff at Visa and he has been interacting with many of them for a number of years. He has run large global operations in the past, and while he is not a technologist per se, he has run large organizations that depend very significantly on technology. We also, as you remember, have parsed our Company in a way where we have focused on technology simultaneous to what we do in our core business and as per your recognition our core business is what’s feeding this engine and what’s creating the revenue and the cash flow that allows us to invest. We have an extremely strong technology organization. We have hired a number of extraordinary individuals over the last two to three years. We are very, very confident that that organization has the ability to continue to take us forward. In fact, I think you’d have to admit that vis-a-vis other companies in our space we’re way upfront and we don’t intend to lose that lead, so thanks for asking the question.

Operating Margin Guidance

Sanjay Sakhrani – KBW: Good luck to Joe as well. Just one of the beauties of Visa’s business model is kind of the scalability and just in looking at your operating margin guidance, it seems like we have another year in 2013 of relatively modest operating margin expansion. Can you just talk about the dynamics that preclude that from happening? Then specific – one just callout or clarification, I was wondering if there was a call out on the other revenue line because that was up a little bit?

Byron H. Pollitt – CFO: With regards to operating margin leverage we have been kicking up the pace of reinvesting particularly in our growth initiatives that are – that really won’t begin to drive revenue in a meaningful way until three and four and five years out and you can look at mobile, V.me and so, what we have done up to this point is invest aggressively in new office expansion and deploying more account executives, serving clients in country, all of which drive margin expansion which as you have noticed has moved from 46%, which seems like a lifetime ago up to 60% and as more of our investment or acquisition are much more forward-looking there will be more of a lag between when that will show up in operating leverage expansion versus pure investment in the core that leverages the completely (at least) in that platform. With regards to other revenue, the reserves associated with the release of the FIN 48 expenses that we had recorded associated with the (NOPA), a part of those reserves were recorded in other income and as we released those reserves they showed up in that column.

A Closer Look: Visa Earnings Cheat Sheet>>