The highly anticipated initial public offering of Visa has finally moved ahead, as the company announced it has filed with regulators Friday to raise up to $10 billion in the IPO.
Visa said about a year ago that it was going to float most of the network, currently owned by its 13,400 member banks. At that time they said they would attempt to go public in about 12 to 18 months, so it looks like they're going to be on their original schedule.
The new public company will be named Visa Inc, and will include the Canadian, U.S. and international Visa operations. The European arm of the company will take a minority position in the new entity, and they'll still a membership organization.
The IPO's purpose, according to Visa, is to use the money to grow the company, while also building an escrow account to help pay for legal bills.
Visa made the announcement two days after they agreed to pay competitor American Express (AXP), Mastercard (MA) and eight banks $2.1 billion in the settlement of a three-year-old antitrust lawsuit. They are also still involved with a number of lawsuits related to other antitrust and price fixing issues.
The company didn't reveal when it would go public, the opening share price or the number of shares it's going to offer at the IPO.
Book-runners for the company will be Merrill Lynch & CO (MER), Wachovia Securities (WB), Banc of America Securities (BAC), Citi (C), JPMorgan (JPM), UBS Investment Bank (UBS), HSBC Securities USA Inc (HBC) and Goldman Sachs & Co (GS).
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Any thoughts on when to buy Visa. My thinking is wait a day or so and see if their's a sell off.
Posted by: Tom S. | November 10, 2007 4:32 PM | Permalink to Comment