The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Visa Marketing

Visa builds European regional marketing hub as integration of Visa Europe continues

Author

By Seb Joseph, News editor

December 5, 2016 | 3 min read

Visa is building a regional pan-European marketing hub to mirror those it has in other markets following the acquisition of Visa Europe earlier this year.

Visa is building a pan-European marketing team following the acquisition of Visa Europe.

Redundancies and job transfers are understood to be taking place now, so details on who from the Visa Europe team is affected by the shake-up are yet to be finalised.

However, all those marketers who do stay with the business will work within the newly-formed regional division in London that will report into the financial firm’s global headquarters in San Francisco.

While most of these roles with have a pan-European remit, The Drum understands that some marketers could be tasked with specific countries, such as UK and Germany, that Visa believes to be lucrative enough to warrant a local presence.

Through these changes, Visa hopes to bring all that is left of the Visa Europe team - in terms of marketers and strategy - in line with how it manages the brand globally, integration that has also led to some global roles being scrapped to avoid duplication.

A Visa spokesman said: “In November, Visa created a more effective organisational structure that resulted from the integration of Visa Europe into Visa Inc. As One Visa, we are pursuing a global approach to marketing communications that will deliver consistency, while also providing us the flexibility to tailor execution for the European region.”

Given Visa completed its acquisition of Visa Europe in July, some aspects of the global realignment such as its media strategy are further ahead than others. All media planning and buying for Europe now sits within Starcom, the agency that has worked for the global Visa business since 2015.

As much as the changes are focused on realigning what remains of the European business, the company hopes to realise $200m in pre-tax synergies each year through to 2020 – around 30% of Visa Europe’s operating expenses. As it does this, the financial firm is also ploughing money into innovation in a bid to sustain the double-digit growth momentum that has propelled its revenues for the last five years.

In that time the way people pay for things has changed, shifting increasingly from cash to electronic forms, which Visa wants to exploit as seen by launches of Visa Checkout, Visa Ad Measurement, Visa Direct and mVisa. For Visa to benefit from the digitisation of commerce, more merchants and consumers need to use its products, which would further cement its 62% dominance of transaction volume around the world.

To help with this, the business opened its first innovation lab in Asia in April and has been working with start-ups through its accelerator scheme

Visa Marketing

More from Visa

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +