Visa Opens Global Network with “Visa Developer” Launch

Visa Inc. has 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.

“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.

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 and

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.

“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.

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.