Visa is truly the global leader in credit cards. It has a market capitalization of $50 billion, and has a total transaction volume of $3.5 trillion per year: it’s worth about 1.4 cents per dollar transacted annually.
Diners Club (remember them?) was just sold by Citigroup for $165 million; it has a transaction volume of $30 billion per year. Which works out at 0.55 cents per dollar transacted annually. Or, to put it another way, Diners Club has 0.86% of Visa’s volume, and only 0.33% of its value.
All of which speaks volumes about Citi’s abilities in the credit-card space. Diners Club more or less invented the credit card, in 1950, and has been part of Citi since 1981. Everybody knows that Citi is good at coming unstuck in investment banking and structured products; it seems that Citi’s not so hot at consumer products either.