The Lowdown: 'I'm sorry, but we don't accept cash here'

Mention the 'c' word and Visa's Malcolm Williamson sees red and he won't rest until every outlet in every country has been converted to cards

To Malcolm Williamson, coins jangling in your pocket are mortal enemies, ripe for destruction. They represent the "old" way of paying and are precisely the sort of thing his company wants to wipe out. To Visa, the world's biggest credit card company, plastic is perfect and cash is definitely not king.

Williamson's stance will be very familiar to students of Visa history. Ed Jensen, his predecessor in the chief executive's hot seat, repeated the following mantra to anyone asking about his company's ambitions: "When I can go out of a hotel and tip the porter using a Visa card and he'll accept it, that's when we will have succeeded."

The softly spoken Bolton-born banker, who came to the fore as the chief executive who saved Standard Chartered from collapse in the early 1990s, maintains exactly the same approach: everything non-plastic is the competition. Before Standard Chartered gave him a picture of global banking, Williamson's positions had been locked in the UK. He was previously managing director of Girobank and maintains the deputy chairman's role at Britannic. The combination of these experiences makes him a man famed for attention to minute detail, which goes a long way to explaining his success at Visa.

He looks at a world where 70 per cent of all transactions are made by cash or cheques and sees a giant opportunity for credit and debit cards. His aim is to snatch market share from these "outdated" means of payment and he fondly imagines a time when credit card payments will be made via chips embedded in mobiles.

Although the US and Europe have already been largely conquered by the culture, huge portions of the globe remain uncolonised. Visa, which is twice as big as its nearest rival, MasterCard, is leading a seemingly unstoppable march of card use. Asia was a relatively late adopter and is, says Williamson, fertile ground. Even greater opportunities lie in South America, in other parts of the developing world and in the online outlets of the internet. "This is the best job in the world," he says. "I wake up every morning knowing we are going to be bigger than we were yesterday."

Williamson's career has been marked by what he calls a "strange affinity" for plastic. It was while he was working at Barclays that the bank invented Barclaycard, the UK's first credit card, something he terms a "massive leap of faith".

As a company, Visa has a complicated structure. Although it is the banks that deal directly with the customers and set lending rates, Visa performs all the mechanisms making card use possible – running a "four-party" loop between itself, the bank, the retailer and the customer. Visa itself is owned by its members – the banks. Since the system was established, the use of plastic in this country has soared to the point where, last year, UK debit transactions outdid cheques for the first time ever.

Debit is a particular area of interest for Visa: it now represents an annual $1,000bn (£630bn) of its $2,300bn revenues, and Williamson is convinced it will soon overtake credit as the favoured method of payment. All this has culminated in his setting some ultra-aggressive targets: he is looking to nearly double Visa's market share of "percentage of customer expenditure" (PCE) by 2010.

Chief executive since 1998, Williamson plans to do this in a number of ways, though in the developed world the strategy is to keep chipping away at embedded practices. "My guess is that the banks will soon recognise cheques are an antiquated product. They have to work out what the public wants, and the public wants to push a button and see the transaction done. School fees, dentist's bills – the more able you are to settle these with a card, the easier it all is. I get cross when I go into a place that doesn't take cards. I mean, what is the point? I just walk out."

He feels particular contempt for stores like John Lewis which for years held out against plastic. "I wasn't surprised when John Lewis caved in. "They were potty not to take cards in the first place."

Around the rest of the world, Visa's plans centre on introducing cards to unconverted cultures, with China a big target. Expanding into China presents problems, largely because it does not have a freely convertible currency and foreign banks can't issue cards there. "Visa runs a money railway around the world, but it hits the buffers in China," says Williamson, though his business plan assumes China's membership of the World Trade Organisation will change all that. Visa's sponsorship of the 2008 Beijing Olympics is a key part of the strategy, and although the company keeps its spending a closely guarded secret, that deal is believed to be worth around $100m.

In the developing world, Williamson's mission is to "bring the 'unbanked' into banking" – persuading employers to give out cards instead of a fistful of banknotes: "It drags people into the banking habit, and is much better than being bonked on the head for your cash."

Nevertheless, the credit card industry is currently burdening Williamson with three big problems. The first of these is security and how well Visa is equipped to cope with fraud – an issue made all the more complicated by the geographic spread of the 29 million outlets that accept Visa. On the internet, where it processes 60 per cent of all transactions, Williamson has launched a service called "Verified by Visa" – a form of online guarantee to ven- dor and buyer that the transaction is taking place securely.

Of greater concern still is "old-fashioned" fraud, amounting to many billions of lost dollars each year: "Magnetic strip fraud is a big problem because we have a lot of clever criminals in the world," he says. "There are 21,000 banks who are our members; they have outsourcers who have outsourcers of their own. Tracking things down can be difficult as the food chain is rather large."

Williamson sees the answer to all this as chip technology, and Visa is trying to persuade the banks to make the expensive leap over to that. Chip technology is more secure than magnetic strips, and its introduction in France 10 years ago reduced card fraud to a tiny fraction of previous levels.

His second big problem is straightforward: Visa thrives when consumer confidence is high, but economists everywhere believe global spending is set for a sharp drop. Williamson is more confident and, as someone who knows more than most about worldwide consumer patterns, comfortingly bullish. He believes shoppers will keep their nerve, even if that does mean shops slashing their prices.

But his biggest problem has been caused by various legal challenges around the world, and most notably a massive class action antitrust suit filed almost six years ago by four million US retailers. Led by Wal-Mart, they are demanding nearly $50bn in compensation. Visa and MasterCard are accused of stifling some debit cards and engineering things so banks could collect more money from retailers. Will- iamson is determined to continue the fight, but his industry is rattled by the prospect of a material change in its business model.

As with other challenges, William- son's greatest fear is complacency. The legal issues, the fraud and everything else centre on a Visa-related problem for which he accepts responsibility: "Yes, it is a weakness of this company: we are not well understood by opinion-formers around the world."