Visa opens up to developers

Visa Inc. launched Visa Developer on Thursday, signalling a shift to a new model of doing business on an open platform and making a series of new technology services and capabilities available to its existing partners and new ones alike.

At launch, Visa Developer has APIs to access 150 different Visa systems, from straight-up stuff like Visa Checkout and Visa Direct, to things like Visa’s location, foreign exchange and tokenization services.

So what has motivated Visa to open up to third-party developers using its technology?

“Visa Developer represents not only a new access point to our network, but a new distribution platform for Visa products and services globally”, said Visa CEO Charlie Scharf in a statement.

This is why services like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Stripe and the DOA CurrentC are being developed, and why Visa, now the biggest name in payments, is slightly shitting itself.

This is critical because, according to research by EY, money payments and transfers are the most common reason for using fintechs, with 17.6% of respondents to a survey having used them at least once in the past year.

Capital One, National Australia Bank, Scotiabank, Tsys and United States bank are among a host of firms to have already taken place in beta trials of the new platform. “TD looks forward to leveraging this platform to create new ways to deliver exceptional digital experiences to our customers”.

TD has been developing a few use cases with Visa’s new APIs as part of a pilot test, says Vipul Lalka, associate vice-president and head of North American mobile banking at TD Bank Group. “Visa has actually provided the sandbox for these APIs, and said here go have your developers plug into the system and test these out”. In addition, forthcoming Visa Developer engagement centers will build collaboration among developers in major markets worldwide.

You can find out more about the Visa Developer platform over at the official website.

According to a press release issued by Visa, the platform is aimed specifically at financial institutions, merchants, and technology companies.

Until today, the VISA network was “extremely closed” VISA executives pointed out.

“While many legacy bank players have been hesitant to see Visa as primarily a technology company, rather than a network provider, Visa Developer will significantly extend its reach to app developers of all varieties, from startups through to technology giants”, he says. 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. “By expanding its positioning, particularly in terms of live deployments and on the ground offerings, this will help to speed up its strategic realignment with its core bank partners”.