Visa Opens its Global Network with Launch of Visa Developer

Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) yesterday announced the launch of Visa Developer, a milestone that transforms the world’s largest retail payments network to an open platform that will drive innovation in payments and commerce. For the first time in the company’s nearly 60 year history, software application developers will have open access to industry leading payments technology, products and services by Visa. The new Visa Developer platform is designed to help financial institutions, merchants, and technology companies meet the demands of consumers and merchants, who increasingly rely on connected devices to shop, pay and get paid. At launch, the new platform will offer access to some of Visa’s most popular 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. Visa plans to provide access to more of its payment capabilities over the next year. Over the past few months leading financial institutions, technology companies, and start-ups have participated in beta trials of the new Visa Developer platform and many have already created innovative prototype applications using Visa technology. Trial partners include Capital One, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank (NAB), RBC, Stripe, TD Bank, and TSYS. According to a recent Accenture and CB Insights study, payments and lending captured a combined 79 percent of Fintech investments in the U.S. in 2014. The creation of the Visa Developer platform has been a multi-year initiative led by Visa’s global product and technology teams. 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.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_application> Key attributes that differentiate Visa’s global developer program include: ·         A globally accessible developer portal offering an easy way to search Visa’s extensive suite of payment products and services. ·         An open platform that provides access to hundreds of Visa APIs and software development kits for some of Visa’s most popular payment products and capabilities. ·         A testing sandbox that offers application developers a plug and play experience, as well as access to Visa test data. ·         Visa Developer engagement centers that are designed to foster collaboration and co-creation with application developers in key markets like San Francisco, Dubai, Singapore, Miami and São Paolo.