Visa Launches Developer Platform with Access to Visa APIs and SDKs

Visa Inc. has recently announced the launch of Visa Developer 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 Visa’s nearly 60 year history, software application developers will have open access to industry leading payments technology, products and services by Visa.

The new platform is designed to help financial institutions, merchants, and technology companies meet the demands of customers and merchants, who increasingly rely on connected devices to shop, pay and get paid.

Visa Developer 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. Besides, the company 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. Visa Developer represents not only a new access point to our network, but a new distribution platform for Visa products and services globally,” said Charlie Scharf, Visa Inc. Chief Executive Officer.

Over the past few months leading financial institutions, technology companies, and start-ups – Capital One, CIBC, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank (NAB), RBC, TD Bank, Scotiabank, TSYS, U.S. Bank and VenueNext – have participated in beta trials of the new platform and many have already created innovative prototype applications using Visa technology. According to a recent Accenture study, FinTech investments reached more than $12B globally in 2014.

The creation of Visa Developer 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). The platform offers an easy way to search Visa’s extensive suite of payment products and services; provides access to hundreds of Visa APIs and software development kits for some of Visa’s most popular payment products and capabilities.

Furthermore, Visa Developer engagement centers 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. 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,” said Rajat Taneja, Visa Inc. Executive Vice President of Technology.

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.

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