Visa Credits Debit Cards for Earnings Beat

Visa's payments volume -- one of the company's key performance measures, along with transactions -- rose 19% to $652 billion in the quarter. Total volume rose 22% from a year earlier to $1 trillion. The number of total payment transactions on Visa cards rose 15% to 10.7 billion. The company now has 1.6 billion cards carrying the Visa brand, it says.

Visa also raised its guidance for its operating margin to the mid-40% range this year, from the low-40% level previously, and to the mid-to-high 40% range for 2009 and 2010. It also reaffirmed its projection that revenue growth will be between 11% and 15%, with EPS growth of 20%, over the next two years.

Competitor MasterCard (MA Quote) is set to report quarterly earnings on Thursday morning.

Shares of Visa rose 3% to $78.45 on Wednesday. Following the close, the stock added another 0.5%.