If you're a dividend investor, it makes logical sense to focus on companies with strong dividend-paying histories. After you've created a list of businesses with good dividend track records -- say, 10 or more years of annual payout increases -- you can start to examine each stock to see if it suits your portfolio. And that's when the question of whether (NYSE: V) is a good dividend stock gets complicated. Here's what you need to know.

Visa's core business is processing purchase transactions for retailers. Its brand is ubiquitous and you can probably find it on a plastic card in your own wallet. If not there, then you might see a placard on the walls of the stores in which you shop that say that Visa is accepted as a form of payment. Every time a person uses a Visa-branded card, the company gets a small slice of the transaction via the fees it charges to retailers. Although any single transaction isn't meaningful, the company handles billions of dollars' worth of transactions. Those fees add up.

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Source Fool.com