Visa Inc. Debutes Visa Next Platform Opening Up New Approach to Consumer Fund Management

Visa introduced its Visa Next platform complete with APIs that will enable issuers and issuer processors to create and test new digital products.

On Monday, Visa Inc. introduced its new platform that is enhanced with complete with beta application programming interfaces (APIs) that are intended to provide issuers and issuer processors with a possibility to create and test new products.

According to the company’s announcement, new options can be accessed by Visa’s clients and partners via Visa Next website.

New APIs

The initial beta APIs that are to be offered will be used by the participants of the Visa ecosystem to issue digital cards on demand and add digital services.

It is also said that digital accounts can be applied for activating and tokenizing other digital accounts that can be found in different other mobile payment wallets.

This shift to digital priorities is quite in line with all the changes that have been taking place in the industry over the past years. Customers need to have more comfortable ways to manage their funds and transact digitally which is now included in the sphere of Visa’s interest as well.

Visa in Digitalization Era

Sam Shrauger, SVP, global issuer and consumer solutions at Visa, shared his view on their recent initiatives.  “We are in an industry that has gone from having to distribute plastic (consider it our version of the DVD), and having a whole physical chain that goes along with that in order for the consumer to use the product to one that has embraced the cloud,” explained he.

According to him, recently the changes have happened both on the merchant and issuer side and if a company wants to do its work properly, it has nothing else but to accept the need to do the things differently.

As Shrauger has shared, the platform operated by Visa provides integration layers with a view to enabling neo-banks, FinTech firms, banks, and others to enjoy the benefits of FinTech capabilities without any serious efforts from their side.

Various companies can plug in and offer different services including device provisioning and card issuance to their clients. Moreover, the platform makes it possible to create and distribute tokenized payment credentials in real time which ensures a proper way of working with sensitive data.

Nevertheless, it’s also worth mentioning that a wide range of opportunities allows offering a wide range of new use cases for managing different financial activities.

For example, parents will be able to create a Visa card linked to an extant account on a mobile device and send it to a child’s account. As a result, a child can safely use parent’s assets and at the same time, parents can fully control this process and limit the spending and the time of the funds usage if needed.

Moreover, the new capacities will be beneficial for travelers as well. They will be able to digitally transact across 200 countries having transferred their wallet balances onto a digital Visa card.

As for the company’s further plans, Shrauger said that they are going to introduce additional beta APIs related to loyalty, benefits and rewards, and new transaction controls.

The main thing that they won’t work on is “another piece of plastic”. According to the company, a purely digital world just does not need it anymore.