10 Most Promising Long-Term Stocks According to Hedge Funds

5. Visa Inc. (NYSE:V)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 163

Analyst Upside as of October 13, 2024: 14%

Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) is a payment card services provider based in the United States. It facilitates electronic fund transfers to people across the globe. It also offers commercial patent solutions, sells cards, and provides B2B payment options. In the past 12 months, Visa has facilitated 296.8 billion transactions with a total volume of $15.5 trillion.

The company has an immense focus on expansion. In the past quarter, Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) partnered with Yape, a super app in Peru housing over 15 million users, to facilitate money transfers directly through mobile devices. In addition to that, digital wallets with over 50 million users enabled Visa cards for their customers in Vietnam.

Towards the end of September, the company announced the acquisition of Featurespace, an AI payments protection technology developer. The acquisition will position Visa as a crucial stakeholder in fraud detection and risk scoring. Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) also launched a pilot project, its Visa Commercial Solutions Hub, to bring all its commercial payment services under the same roof, disrupting a $145 trillion market.

Analysts are bullish on the stock, which comes as no surprise. The company has a strong network that is prevalent in 200 countries and territories from across the globe. Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) has more than 130 million merchant locations and has over 4.5 billion cards in circulation across the globe.

Aoris International Fund stated the following regarding Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:

“Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) operates the world’s largest payments network, which facilitates the movement of money between merchants, financial institutions, consumers, businesses, and governments.

The company is best known for enabling consumers to make debit and credit card payments. In the year to September 2023, 4.3 billion Visa cardholders made 213 billion transactions on its network, to a total value of US$12.1 trillion.

Compared to cash and cheques, which are still widely used around the world, Visa’s network is a more convenient, secure, and ubiquitous way for consumers to pay. Visa has invested to reduce friction and fraud in the payments experience, to the benefit of both merchants and consumers…” (Click here to read the full text)