Visa Opens its Global Network with Launch of Visa Developer

Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) today 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.

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Visa Developer homepage (Photo: Business Wire)

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.

“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.”

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, CIBC, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank (NAB), RBC, TD Bank, Scotiabank, TSYS, U.S. Bank and VenueNext. According to a recent Accenture study, FinTech investments reached more than $12B globally in 2014.¹

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. 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 Paulo.

“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.”

Visa’s vision for its global developer engagement program includes the creation of a marketplace that enables thousands of financial institutions, millions of merchants and technology companies to collaborate, share and search for innovative digital commerce applications and services.

To watch a live webcast of the Visa Developer launch event on Thursday, February 4, 2016, at 10am PT, please visit http://www.webcastregister.com/visa/event/.

Client and Partner Quotes:

Visa’s launch clients and partners around the world are sharing their views on what this important milestone means for them and their customers.

“Visa’s new Developer platform will help simplify the delivery of easy access payment solutions for our clients and we are excited about its potential to increase our speed to market in some areas,” says Alison James, vice president, Cards Technology, CIBC. “It’s encouraging to see partners like Visa continue to bring innovation to life and take another step forward in the advancement of integrated and adaptable payment technologies.”

“Australians are among the world’s fastest adopters of new technologies and our partnership with Visa enables NAB to act more quickly to deliver market-leading innovations and great experiences for our customers,” said Antony Cahill, NAB group executive, Product & Markets.

“For RBC, innovation is fundamental to how we’re providing relevant, secure and convenient solutions to our clients,” said Linda Mantia, executive vice president, Digital, Payments & Cards, RBC. “By working with our ecosystem partners like Visa, we can continue to provide easy to use, value-added services. As an example, we’ve already started working on solutions leveraging Visa’s newly released APIs to ultimately bring added convenience and flexibility to RBC mobile clients at a much faster pace than was possible in the past.”

“Scotiabank applauds the creation of the Visa Developer platform for its ability to accelerate innovation and the launch of new, customer-focused payments solutions,” said Brian McCabe, vice president, Day to Day Banking at Scotiabank. “The payments ecosystem is evolving rapidly, making the timely delivery of solutions-driven technology more critical than ever.”

“The Visa Developer program presents a tremendous opportunity to elevate the global payments and commerce space," said Ruby Walia, headý of mobile & online banking, TD Bank Group. "TD looks forward to leveraging this platform to create new ways to deliver exceptional digital experiences to our customers."

“TSYS has a long-standing business relationship with Visa, and we are thrilled to be one of the first payment solutions providers included in the Visa Developer program,” said Craig Ludwig, head of product for TSYS’ Merchant Services segment. “Their exciting new APIs allow us to deliver next-generation products and services that our issuing, acquiring and merchant clients can use to grow their businesses. By implementing Visa’s new technology, we will be at the forefront of payment product innovation.”

"Banks and collaborators in the FinTech industry that are committed to delivering customers faster, more efficient and secure financial services need to test, learn and deploy new ideas quickly in order to remain competitive," said Dominic Venturo, chief innovation officer at U.S. Bank. "Collaboration is key, and the developer portals and tools offered by Visa enable U.S. Bank to bring new ideas to reality for our customers more quickly and with less development investment than traditional approaches."

“At VenueNext we’re on a mission to transform venue experiences, and a big part of this is making payments seamless for both the guest and the venue operator,” said John Paul, CEO & founder, VenueNext. “Working together with Visa’s development team was a joy as we quickly and easily integrated Visa Checkout into our technology platform. We’re looking forward to doing more together in secure payments as the credit card disappears into the smartphone.”

“We congratulate Visa on the launch of the Developer platform and are proud to be a pioneer in using this advanced service by being the first bank globally to implement Visa’s Mobile Location Confirmation (MLC) service,” said Suvo Sarkar, senior executive vice president & group head, Retail Banking and Wealth Management, Emirates NBD. “Our partnership with Visa has enabled us to leverage best practices in enhancing the customer experience on payment cards and has contributed significantly to our market leadership in the UAE’s fast growing digital banking space. We were the first bank in the Central Europe, Middle East and Africa region to sign up to Visa Inc.’s new Digital Enablement Program (VDEP) and among the first in the region to sign up for the Visa Checkout service. We look forward to increased collaboration which will continue to define convenient new ways for our customers to bank.”

About Visa

Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) is a global payments technology company that connects consumers, businesses, financial institutions, and governments in more than 200 countries and territories to fast, secure and reliable electronic payments. We operate one of the world’s most advanced processing networks — VisaNet — that is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second, with fraud protection for consumers and assured payment for merchants. Visa is not a bank and does not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers. Visa’s innovations, however, enable its financial institution customers to offer consumers more choices: pay now with debit, ahead of time with prepaid or later with credit products. For more information, visit usa.visa.com/about-visa, visacorporate.tumblr.com and @VisaNews.

¹ Source: Accenture, “The Future of FinTech and Banking: Digitally disrupted or reimagined?” report, based on CB Insights data.

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