IR in Focus | Season 3 | Ep. 4 - Empowering Investor Relations: Lessons from Jennifer Como at Visa

View Full Transcript

Carmen Lilly:

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to IR in Focus. I'm your host, Carmen Neli. And in today's episode, I sit down with the head of investor relations at Visa to explore the company's role at the intersection of global finance, innovation, and investor engagement. Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer Como.

Jennifer Como:

So happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Carmen Lilly:

I am so happy that you're on this podcast as well. Now before we get into the our questions and interview here, I did wanna spend a little bit of time to introduce you to our audience. So Jennifer Como currently serves as a senior vice president and head of global investor relations at Visa. She joined the company in 2019 after a nearly twenty year career across financial services in the payments, banking, insurance, and brokerage sectors, holding roles in corporate finance, communications, strategy, and investor relations. This co owner team have consistently been rated among the top investor relations professionals by Institutional Investor magazine. You have a great, great background, and, yeah, I'm sure you have a wealth of information. So let's jump right into my question list here. So you've been at the helm of Visa's IR program since 2022, but you, again, like I mentioned, have a rich background in the banking and payment sector as well as experience across several corporate roles, including IR, finance, and strategy. So how did you find yourself in IR, and what was it a role that you were initially drawn to?

Jennifer Como:

Great question. So once again, thanks for having me. So as you just covered, I started my career in investment banking covering fintechs, and I was fortunate enough as a first year analyst to get to work on the PayPal IPO. So one could say that payments was there from the beginning for me. In terms of investor relations, that was the first time I was exposed to it when I went with PayPal on their IPO roadshow. And I loved it was my favorite part of investment banking. I love traveling around with the management team, meeting with different investors who asked asked all sorts of questions. I was really curious about it.

 

Jennifer Como:

After being an analyst for a while, I went new insurance and then I went to business school. And when I was at business school thinking about what I wanted my career to be after business school, I decided I really wanted to give Ira a go. It just really seemed to combine so many different skill sets, whether it's finance, communication, strategy, and enabled me to really interact with senior management on a daily basis. And the last piece that I was attracted to is just it seemed like a role where you were always learning, and that's something I love to do. But I will tell you, IR can be a little bit of a difficult role to crack into, especially at that mid level. So most IR teams are not huge, and that middle level is often earmarked for an internal candidate and can often even be an internal rotational role. So it was funny. My second year at business school, I was interviewing, and I was actually interviewing for the number two role at a company in IR.

 

Jennifer Como:

And I was not even, I think, five minutes into the role where the talent adviser said, oh, no. This isn't the job for you. You're gonna go interview for this other role. So I tried and and couldn't even get it back then, and and she ended up having me interview for a chief of staff role reporting to the CEO, which I just loved. But it was interesting. IR became, as I like to call my white whale, to use a Moby Dick reference, and I kept trying to get into it. And the universe just kept pushing me in another direction. But as I look back, I'm so grateful because I've had so many different roles as you just rattle off in finance and strategy in different businesses.

And I love really understanding how businesses and and products work, and it's actually made me a better investor relations officer. So I moved out to California after business school, and I spent about six years at Charles Schwab. And everyone there knew I wanted to work in IR, but there was never a role open. So I actually left Schwab and went to work at Wells Fargo in the card business. So I call that my return to payments. And about a year and a half in, I got the call from Schwab, and they said the IR role is open. And Wells Fargo and Charles Schwab back then in San Francisco Francisco were about a ten minute walk from each other, and I remember jumping out of my seat and literally wanting to run down the street because I was so excited. So I interviewed, I got the job, but then I was a little nervous. Right? I wanted to go into this job for ten years, essentially. Would it be all that I'd hoped for, and would I be any good at it? Right? And it really far exceeded my expectations as a role, as a career, and, man, I love doing it. So that's kinda my story.

 

Carmen Lilly: Jennifer, that is so funny. You had me chuckling here because the more and I think we're kind of opposite here. The more I learn about IR, obviously, I'm not in IR. I run business development for S and P. The more I learn about it, the more I'm like, I don't know if I know if I if I wanna do that. But and that's so funny how it, you know, it became something that you just really lusted after me. Like, I am going to be IR if if it's a case of a bad day. That is

 

Jennifer Como:

And it's funny. I remember my my first couple weeks in, the then CFO at Charles Schwab. We were traveling somewhere, and he said, I hope it's all you hoped. And I said, yeah. It is. It is. And now I've been doing it for ten years. Yeah. Ten almost eleven years. Yeah.

 

Carmen Lilly:

I get the draw, of it in terms of what you're saying around. You're constantly learning. Right? And those IR teams, like you mentioned, are really lean, and so you're wearing a lot of hats. You're doing a lot of duties and responsibilities, and really being a connective tissue across that the corporate group. So I do understand your your draw to IR. I just think it's funny how you've been trying to crack into it. So my second question here is around the payments processing sector, and you kinda you kinda answered this, but let me just let me pose this a little bit and see if we can get a deeper dive here. So we know that Visa is a powerhouse corporation in the payments processing sector, but I wouldn't necessarily call it, like, a really enticing industry to get involved in, And I may be wrong entirely here, but what really drew you to this industry or maybe Visa in particular?

 

Jennifer Como:

Yeah. So as I mentioned, I kinda started in payments and then about ten years later, went back to payments. And what I love about payments and particularly in working for Visa is that we make commerce happen. I mean, essentially, you can't buy things without payments occurring. Right? And as I think about Visa, we enable the movement of money globally. We're all over the world. You can literally walk into any store anywhere in the world. And if there's a Visa sticker on the door, you know everything's gonna go okay.

Right? And moreover, that merchant feels comfortable accepting you buying something using your Visa card because they know everything's gonna be okay. And it's interesting. I remember my first couple weeks at Visa, we had a meeting with an investor who had never owned Visa and never really done any work on Visa specifically. And as you said, we're a powerhouse corporation and we're a very widely held stock. So it's very rare we meet an investor who really doesn't know anything about Visa. And what he said to us is he said, you know, I've been focusing really on venture, so pre IPO fintechs and and really early fintechs post IPO. And and I I hadn't really looked at the networks before, he said. And then what he shared was as he was meeting with more and more fintechs, they all said, oh, yes.

I'm working with Visa on this, or I'm working with Visa on this, or Visa is helping me to grow here or there. And what he said is, I didn't realize how much, Visa, you work with all of these fintechs to enable the movement of money and to really help this entire payments ecosystem grow and develop and innovate. And so we said, I need you to find out more about Visa. And then he became an investor. So I think maybe your perception is, oh, Visa might be a a a payments company, but I don't know. But it's actually fueling so much of the innovation in the space and really enabling you to get go about your day every single day. And I'd say between ecommerce, AI, crypto, any sort of innovation in the space, we're typically involved. And so that's what excites me about Visa is that we're enabling commerce every single day, and it is an incredibly dynamic space with tons of innovation. And that's what keeps me here.

 

Carmen Lilly:

That's awesome. That's an amazing way to look at it. And as you were kind of laying that out, I was like, yeah. You guys really do power the consumer markets. Right? And making making sure that that engine is running. And to your point, you know, Visa really is at the head of innovation in a lot of a lot of these spaces. That's that's really cool. I I buy your I buy your pitch here.

 

Jennifer Como:

That's that's Well, as I as I say to everybody, I have the best job in the world. I get to tell the Visa story every day, and and I think it's so exciting to see the history of Visa and how we've really fueled innovation from from the jump.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Yeah. Amazing. So tightening up and thinking about the current environment and how Visa is thinking about, you know, what's going on in the markets today. So the macroeconomic environment is pretty volatile. The markets are volatile. And I see, especially during this earning season, a lot of investors are posing the same questions to corporations. You know, in in general, they're asking you, how will you weather this environment? And I saw you most recently had an earnings call where this was also brought up. So I just wanted to give you a moment to kind of explain and talk about how Visa is thinking about and handling the market swings right now.

 

Jennifer Como:

Yeah. It's interesting. Right before our last earnings call, I was getting a number of investors really pushing on this. Right? Really asking how how would how would the business do? What would you all do if things got worse? And, really, when we had our earnings call, we thought really hard about how can we provide more insight, more disclosure so that people have a better sense of how we might respond if things get bad. Right? And really, it's the the foundational element is that we have an incredibly diverse business. It's funny. Even today, I was talking to an investor and he said, I know you have a diverse business, but then something happens and I get worried and then you remind me and then I'm okay. So it's very interesting.

Even some of our biggest and longest longest holders forget that from time to time. So when we think about our business, we operate in 200 countries and territories. We have nearly $16,000,000,000,000 in total volume. That's both cash and payments volume in our fiscal year twenty four. When you think about the diversity of spend we see, we see face to face, online, discretionary, nondiscretionary, travel, everyday spend, spend in other countries, consumer spend, commercial spend. It is just so incredibly diverse. And in terms of how we would respond, of course, it's going to depend on what exactly is going on and and how our business is being impacted. But I would just share that comparing our business today to maybe prior periods, we have more everyday spending, more ecommerce spend.

Our debit mix is bigger, and all of that can really lend itself to to strength and relative resilience because people tend to spend the money they have versus the money they don't have. People tend to have a good amount of non discretionary spending even in times of economic uncertainty. And so given our mix, it does lend itself to relative resilience, and we're just more diverse geographically. So if something's going on in one part of the world, but the other part of the world is doing fine, there there's that strength of that diverse model. And then furthermore, in terms of our revenue itself, it's way more diverse than it's been in prior periods. But to your fundamental question, what would we do? Right? Every day at Visa, our management team gets our daily volumes all over the world. We're looking at them. We're seeing if we can spot any trends or patterns that might be of import, and then we're evaluating what impact might that have on our business, both positive and negatively.

And if it will have an impact, is there anything we wanna do as a result? We're really striving to balance between short term and long term considerations, and we want to respond in a really thoughtful and measured way depending on what's going on. And in terms of we could ask this question, what would you do if a recession or geopolitical shock happened? And to the extent our business was being significantly impacted, we have demonstrated in the past our willingness to adjust our spending plans. We can reprioritize investments, scale back or delay programs, or pull back as appropriate certain expenses, whether that's personnel, marketing, t and e, and other controllable categories. I would just say at Visa, we have contingency plans in place. We're doing scenario planning multiple times a year, and we stand at the ready to to take action if we need to. But thus far, our relative consumer spending, as as you referenced, you listened to our earliest call, has been relatively resilient and strong, but we stand at the ready.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Interesting point here. So you're prepping and doing the legwork needed in order to be nimble, and you also mentioned that you do have a broad and diverse revenue streams. Would you say, though, did COVID impact and kinda, like, tighten up these contingency plans, or is this something that Visa is kind of used to and has been contingency planning pre COVID?

 

Jennifer Como:

Sure. So I've only been at the company a little over six years. So I was here before COVID and during COVID and now after COVID. And I'd say I just like to remind people we are relatively young public company. So we still are, as I like to say, teenagers. We're in our mid teens, let's call it. But, yes, we when we became a public company, we established proper finance processes and protocols. And part of that strategic planning is to make sure you're preparing for different scenarios.

 

And so we had we had scenario planning that we did a few times a year. And then, of course, when COVID hit, though, no one has ever experienced something like COVID. We had to I'd say, what changed is the velocity of that in terms of looking at our volumes every day, deciding every day if anything needed to happen, deciding if anything was was impacting our business. And so I'd say the velocity of that has increased, but we've always done scenario planning, as a company.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Awesome. Thank you. I was just curious about that because a lot a lot of times when I talk to corporations, you know, a lot of times what I hear is, like, a turning point was COVID. But it sounds like Visa and and it's nice to remind folks that Visa is a relatively young company, like you said, like a a teenager. So, like, COVID really did put you guys through a good prep test, I I feel like.

 

Jennifer Como

Yeah. And I I think I would also just offer as someone that's been in investor relations at Visa through that time, we we hit this time, and and I'm not feeling anxious like I did back in COVID because I've been through really uncertain periods before and feel really confident about our ability to manage through that and to effectively communicate with investors.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Yeah. And just going back to Visa's business in general. So Visa is often seen as a bellwether for global consumer spending. How does the company or how do you interpret cross border volume and domestic spending patterns? And what sort of outlook could you give here? I know you guys are doing your own kind of forecasting and outlook in order to be prepped and ready for anything that happens. But is there anything that you can share in terms of what you're seeing in terms of cross border and domestic spending and what's in in store here?

 

Jennifer Como:

It's interesting. I remind any investor that invests in Visa, you're gonna hear a lot of stuff. Right? So you hear lots of news from different companies. But what we do here at Visa is we're rooted in the facts. What do we see in our data? And in our data so far, consumer spending remains strong and resilient. If we hone in on The US in our second quarter and through April, we've really not seen any signs of overall consumer spending weakening. And we look at this by spend bands. And so when we look at this by income spend spend bands, sort of, we know how much someone spends in a given month.

The most affluent are growing the fastest, but even so, all spend bands remain resilient and generally consistent with past quarters. And when we look inside quarterly spend category data in The US, We adjust for leap year, and we saw travel and entertainment growth did decelerate, but restaurant growth remains stable, and retail and fuel growth improved. So what that what that showcases is the the beauty of the diverse business model. And at its highest level, we see strong and stable both discretionary and nondiscretionary spend growth, which really just demonstrates that resilience that I spoke about in the beginning. In terms of cross border, our cross border volume growth was in line with our q four levels in our fiscal q two. And we have seen some impacts from currency weakness, travel to specific countries, but the overall growth was strong and above the pre COVID trend. And our expectation going forward that we shared at our earnings call is for our fiscal q three and fiscal q four. We assume those volumes are generally in line with the average of March and April.

Now we did have, Easter and Ramadan timing that can impact that impacted, March and April. So when you average those together, it normalizes for that. And then it incorporates the other factors I just spoke about in terms of impacts from currency weakness and travel to specific countries. And, essentially, that puts q three and q four cross border volume growth slightly below q four levels, but still very strong and much stronger than pre pandemic growth rates. We're gonna keep watching. And while we're certainly not immune to macroeconomic impacts, as I mentioned, our diverse business model has proven to be resilient in in a variety of environments and as demonstrated in our recent quarter.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Great. Thank you. And now shifting a little bit thinking about innovation and and forward looking, and I'm sure you've had many, many conversations where AI comes up. Right? So let's let's talk about AI a little bit. So Visa has been investing in AI and machine learning for things like fraud prevention and data analytics. Can you share a little bit more about how these technologies are shaping Visa's future offerings?

 

Jennifer Como:

Sure. I'm so glad you asked this question. We hosted our twenty twenty five product drop just last week, and I encourage others if they haven't checked it out to check it out. The the new products we introduced really speak to the the heart of your question. To start, though, all of what you referenced, AI, machine learning, fraud prevention, data analytics are built on a foundation of data and technology, and we've got a lot of that. Right? We had over 300,000,000,000 transactions, and as I mentioned, nearly 16,000,000,000,000 of total volume in 2024. That's a lot of data. And so that scale brings a tremendous amount of data, which we leverage to enhance enhance our products and offerings and make the payments ecosystem safer.

And in that regard, we have a number of AI related risk products. We have decades of experience in helping to manage fraud, and we're really excited about all that we're bringing to market in the risk space. To go specifically to the product drop because it's the newest and I'm really excited about, we talked about this Visa intelligent commerce program. And, essentially, what we're doing is we're taking a set of tools that we have within within Visa, and we're giving AI agents the capability to go to make payments on our behalf. Pretty amazing. Right? So, essentially, what we're what it what it's doing is taking our tokenization capabilities, our authentication capabilities, our personalization capabilities that are brought to bear with something we call the we call a data token, which essentially gives us the consumer control over what data we wanna share with this AI agent based on Visa spend and purchase insights. So we give permission and Visa can share it with the AI agent. And then, of course, you want this to be simple and secure, so we provide, transaction controls and specific payment instructions that make it very clear as to what you want the agent to do.

And you package it all together with these great partnerships we have with AI platforms, and it enables commerce. So, essentially, you turn on you enable your credential to work in in an AI environment, and you tell the AI agent to go find you you know, go plan a great, vacation for you. And it uses this all these great amazing tools from Visa to curate and create this wonderful trip for you that then you accept and the AI agent goes and purchases it on your behalf. Pretty neat stuff.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Yeah. That's amazing. So when I talk about AI, I do hear a lot of folks really honing in on the agentic piece of this, which I believe is what what you're referring to. Right? You have, like, an AI agent at your disposal to help you with complicated tasks because that that's really cool. I like that a lot.

 

Jennifer Como:

Yes. Agentic commerce, we think, is really important, and we're excited to be a part of it.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Mhmm. And then thinking about so you mentioned, like, this this rollout was was done, through a special event. But turning back to your earnings call. So you recently had your earnings call, on April 30. Can you shine just a little bit of light onto how you prepare for these calls and any sort of processes within that prep that you really enjoy doing?

 

Jennifer Como:

Yes. I love earnings. As I like to say, you get to have a Super Bowl four times a year. So it's it's I I enjoy it very much, which is good if you're doing this job. The key to to a successful earnings call is preparation and process. And as I mentioned, Visa is a relatively young public company. And when I came here about six a little over six years ago, we really I really brought with me a lot of IR experience to establish those processes and really make sure that we're running a very tight ship in terms of in terms of earnings. And, it it involves partnership from everyone across Visa.

Those those who work in Visa would tell you one of my one of my phrases is everyone works in IR. They just may not know it. So it's really fun to work across the company, and we set very clear expectations, make the deadlines known, and then we provide regular updates to everybody so they know what to expect. My two favorite parts of earnings, the first is that very early on in the earnings process, I get to meet with each one of our regional and product heads, and they just talk about the business. And I love learning about the business. Some of what they're saying, we may use an earnings. Some of it, we we may not. But as I mentioned at the beginning, I love to learn.

So that part I really, really enjoy because I'm understanding what's going on in that particular country in terms of competitive landscape, regulatory, landscape, and then any cool products and solutions we're developing as a result. My second favorite is towards the end of earnings, which is kind of neat. I guess I have a favorite at the beginning and the end, and that's q and a prep. I come up with any type of question I think we might get asked. We workshop the questions, with our with our CEO and CFO, and then I get to grill them. And that is my favorite part. And the whole the whole part of that is if they can make it through the prep with me, they're gonna do great on the call. It's gonna feel like a cakewalk.

And so that's really my favorite time to get to help prepare the executives to do those calls.

 

Carmen Lilly:

That's amazing. And your energy also is really amazing, and that you've truly and I can tell you truly enjoy that the pieces of earnings prep and and large swaths of of what you do in the IR role day in and day out. I see why this career was was was for you, really. And I really like your comments on the the q and a piece. I think that as an, like, investor, listening in on these earnings calls, I think the q and a portion is by far the most interesting section to really listen, dig into, and understand what questions are asked and how the c suite is answering those. And I love how you are saying that, like, yep, that's part of your favorite prep too, making sure the c suite is ready for any sort of questions that are coming up.

 

Jennifer Como:

For sure.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Yeah. Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about your career in IR. In terms of of thinking about your your career, and, again, you've worn many different hats over your career, but what have been the most rewarding and the maybe the most challenging aspects of leading IR at a company as globally recognized as Visa?

 

Jennifer Como:

Sure. So on the challenging side, we are a very large company that is global. And sometimes it feels like IR is crisis communications every day in the sense that we truly are a global company and something is always happening in some part of the world. So it can be really demanding and and and you never know what what the day is going to bring. And so that part I'd say is challenging, but it's also interesting. I'd also say we are very widely held and we're very busy. So we have a ton of investors, and we have a lot of sell side analysts, and that keeps us very busy. I I know most people I speak to other folks, that do investor relations.

 

I do hundreds of calls, post earnings. It's very demanding. But like I said, it's also really fun. And then I'd say my so those are kind of the challenging, but still kind of interesting things I'd mentioned. And then in terms of most rewarding, there's two things I'd mentioned. One is I love to target and meet with new investors and try to get them to to really understand the Visa story and hopefully, make it become an investor. It's so rewarding to see them really understand the story, believe in it as much as we do, and then really invest. And it's interesting.

We had a larger investor buy into Visa this year, and it's been so fun. We just checked in with them yesterday, actually. It's so fun to see how excited they are about being investors in Visa. My second rewarding piece is that IR is truly one of the last great apprenticeship models. I love watching my team learn and grow and become great IR professionals. And one of my favorite things to to see is people who have worked for me go off and are running IR at other companies. That's my favorite thing about being in IR.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Jennifer, a side question here. Do are you involved in did you grow up playing sports or anything like that? You would make, like, an excellent head coach.

 

Jennifer Como:

So I, I'd like to call myself as marginally athletic. So I I played a lot of sports, but I was a great teammate. Maybe that's the best way to say it. I was a great teammate, but not very not very skilled. That's probably the best way to say it. But, you know, I've enjoyed coaching my kids' sports. I've really enjoyed that. And, so maybe that that's my calling.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Yeah. I know. And as you were kind of explaining things that get you excited, things that are challenging and rewarding, A lot of the again, I have young kids as well. It was reminding me of just, like, a lot of those things you also learn young when you play sports. And I was like, wow. She is so she's so good at this. She should. Was she involved in sports when she was younger?

 

Jennifer Como:

I was, but I wasn't very good. So

 

Carmen Lilly:

funny, funny. Okay. So let's take maybe, like, a forward looking question here. This one can be answered, like, on a personal level, like, in terms of, like, achieving a personal goal or more broadly thinking about the markets. But how do you expect the rest of the year to play out?

 

Jennifer Como:

Yeah. So this is gonna relate to what I just said, but I finally was allowed to hire a few more people on the IR team, which is awesome. And I'm just really excited to watch them grow and develop so that they can start talking and doing more and more meetings with investors and really see the the wonder of being an IR. So that's I that's really what I'm expecting for the rest of the year on a professional level. I'm I'm so excited to see them. And, actually, this quarter was the first quarter '1 member of my team started doing calls, and it's so fun to see them, start to do that. And it's scary when you do your first call because you're thinking every word I say could literally affect the movement of the stock. That's a lot that's a lot of pressure.

So that's why I'm expecting the year to go professionally. Personally, just related to the athletics, I've really been working on my golf game. So I really hope to become better at golf by the end of the year. It is my favorite thing to do in my spare time. So I hope to finally be a little better. It's a frustrating sport, but, man, I love it.

 

Carmen Lilly:

Man. Yeah. You're just full you're full of surprising things. I don't think I would ever say, yep. You know, I'm looking forward to playing that round of golf. You know? That's so funny. Amazing. Okay.

So last but not least, I like to close out the podcast with just one piece of advice you'd give IROs or strategy professionals.

 

Jennifer Como:

Yes. Well, I have anybody who works with me or is my friend knows I have a million mantras, so it's hard to pick just one. But I'd say, especially early on in your career, my biggest piece of advice is to have an opinion. Within my team, even within the first week, I ask them what they think about everything. And it's really important to know that it's okay to be vulnerable. It's okay to have an opinion that no one else agrees with. That's how you get better. Right? And many cases, your opinion is the best one.

Your idea is the best one. And so I really value diversity of thought and encourage anyone to have an opinion, and it helps me. It makes me better. I'd also say in the role of investor relations as the head, there's many cases where it's not clear as to what the best path forward is, and you really have to have experience in gathering the facts and coming up with your recommendation, your opinion. And, many executive teams really appreciate that. Our former chairman and CEO, Al Kelly, once gave me the the highest compliment. He did tell me it was a compliment after, but he said, Jennifer, I always know if I ask for your opinion, I'm gonna get it. And and I said, oh, no.

Is that a bad thing? And he said, no. That's that's an awesome thing. And to be known for that is a really good thing because not a lot of people have that kind of courage. So I would just encourage folks to have an opinion.

 

Carmen Lilly:

That's amazing. I love that advice. Alright. So that is all the time we have today. Thank you, listeners, and thank you to my special guest, Jennifer Como. What a great lively discussion. I really enjoyed it. Now listeners, let me know if there are any topics you'd like me to cover. But until next time, happy listening.