On Thursday, Visa announced the launch of a new developer platform in an attempt to take on PayPal.
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At launch, Visa Developer has APIs to access 150 different Visa systems, ranging from Visa Checkout and Visa Direct, to Visa’s location and tokenization services.
“We are unbundling Visa’s full suite of products and services and giving developers open access to the underlying payment capabilities”, says Rajat Taneja, executive vice-president of technology at Visa.
“The convergence of web, mobile and social networks is revolutionizing the way people buy and sell, and is driving the creation of new and innovative ways to pay”, said Jim McCarthy, global head of product for Visa Inc.in a statement.
What’s more, Visa operates operates the world’s largest payments processing network, and by opening it up to third party developers, the company is betting that it can become a more ubiquitous alternative in the race for online and mobile payments.
FinTech investment, according to an Accenture study, stood at more than $12bn in 2014.
The Visa Developer platform, as it is known, has already been trialled by finance firms and technology companies, including Capital One, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank, TD Bank, Scotiabank and VenueNext. “One of the core reasons we are so excited about today’s public launch is because Visa Developer is not a test or labs initiative like others in the space have done”.
Test data is available, as is a testing sandbox for developers to try out their apps. In addition, forthcoming Visa Developer engagement centers will build collaboration among developers in major markets worldwide. The team is transforming Visa’s payment products and services into application programming interfaces (APIs), standard technology used by developers for building software and applications.
Visa has more than 2.6 billion credit and debit cards in the market and processed $7 billion on its network in 2015.
“The Visa Developer platform will provide a new front door to Visa, enabling our financial institutions, merchants and developers to work individually or together and co-innovate using a range of digital payment capabilities we are making available”, said Kerr. Whereas traditionally, the choice of payment provider was largely an accounting and finance issue, developers have now come to the fore as key decision makers in payments. This also means that newer Visa services, such as tokenisation, and P2P push payments can spread more rapidly to a wider end user base than may have been possible on a traditional bank by bank approach.
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The announcement is a signifiant move for Visa.
