Visa opens up payment tech to devs around the globe

Visa this week announced that the launch of Visa Developer, a platform which it says makes its payment technologies freely available to developers as it looks to accelerate its presence in the ecommerce space.

According to a press release issued by Visa, the platform is aimed specifically at financial institutions, merchants, and technology companies. The idea, the financial services giant says, is to help these companies “meet the demands of consumers and merchants, who increasingly rely on connected devices to shop, pay and get paid”.

The platform offers access to some of Visa payment technologies and services including account holder identification, person-to-person payment capabilities, secure in-store and online payment services such as Visa Checkout, currency conversion and consumer transaction alerts.

“As the leader in payments we have an opportunity to transform global commerce by opening-up access to our global network and supporting our clients, industry partners and innovators in their pursuit of creating new, easier and more secure ways to pay,” said Charlie Scharf, chief executive officer, Visa Inc. “Visa Developer represents not only a new access point to our network, but a new distribution platform for Visa products and services globally.”

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According to the Visa release, the platform is the culmination of a multi-year initiative led by Visa’s global product and technology teams. These teams are reportedly transforming Visa’s payment products and services into application programming interfaces (APIs), standard technology used by developers for building software and applications.

“We are unbundling Visa’s full suite of products and services and giving developers open access to the underlying payment capabilities,” said Rajat Taneja, executive vice president of technology, Visa Inc. “We believe this will lead to the creation of entirely new commerce experiences with Visa technology integrated to enable greater security, scale and convenience when it comes time to pay. When you add the ability to distribute those new experiences across Visa’s global network, you can see why Visa Developer will become the preferred playground for developers everywhere.”

According to Visa, a number of its clients — which include financial institutions, technology companies, and startups — have Beta-tested the Visa Developer platform. Some, Visa says, have created prototype applications using Visa technology. Trial partners include Capital One, CIBC, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank (NAB), RBC, TD Bank, Scotiabank, TSYS, U.S. Bank and VenueNext.