Visa Aims to Boost Commerce Products with Outside Developer Help
Visa wants to strengthen its commerce offerings by opening up its technology treasure chest to software developers bent on improving consumer experiences. The payment network has launched Visa Developer, an “open platform that gives application developers access to Visa’s payments technology, products and services.”
Here’s the general idea: Software developers at financial institutions, retailers and technology companies can register with Visa Developer to browse the payment network’s application programming interfaces, or APIs, which govern how software components work with each other, and which are used when building software applications. Visa Developer offers access to more than 100 APIs that help govern Visa’s various payment technology platforms. Those outside developers “will be able to enhance their own applications or create new commerce experiences by integrating Visa APIs, and test their creations in the Visa Developer sandbox using Visa test data.” In short, that outside help could end up building better Visa products.
“We are unbundling Visa’s suite of products and services and giving developers access to the underlying payment capabilities,” says Rajat Taneja, executive vice president of technology at Visa. “We believe this will lead to entirely new digital commerce experiences with Visa payment capabilities integrated and providing the security and convenience consumers have come to expect of Visa.”
Visa is not the first company to open up its technology to developers that might be able to craft improved or enhanced services for specific consumer niches—and get those changes into the market more quickly. Several payments technology providers, particularly processors, as well as online retailers and their service providers have been doing so for the past few years, especially as more consumers use both laptops and their mobile devices to search for and buy products, a progression that heightens demand for better technology and services.
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