According to ovum comment, “The recent launch of Visa’s Developer platform marks a significant shift for the global payments network, and wide digital payments space. With a host of API’s offering a full mix of payment functionality, all built on Visa’s underlying core network, Visa is opening up its full capabilities directly to the broader digital ecosystem while cementing its place in the future of payments. 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.”
“The explosion in growth for payment providers such as Stripe and Braintree has provided a broader shift in thinking in the payments space, with a focus on developer friendly tools, that are flexible and easy to deploy. Whereas traditionally, the choice of payment provider was largely an accounting and finance issue, developers have now come to the fore as key decision makers in payments. The API-fication of payments will continue to gather momentum, and has the potential to lead to a significant increase in new payment services and functionalities.”
“By providing the tools for developers in start-ups, and indeed amongst major enterprises, this ultimately helps protect Visa from the risk of disintermediation. The brand visibility of Visa will likely fall into the background in some deployments, but the company will nonetheless form the backbone of these services. This will help to ensure transaction volumes remain high in an increasingly cardless world, and keep Visa at the centre of the digital payments ecosystem. This also means that newer Visa services, such as Tokenization, 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.”
“Perceptions are slowly changing as Visa expands its technological services and offerings, but Visa Developer’s direct appeal to the developer community gives it scope to circumnavigate existing bank partners and significantly increase its role in the broader digital payments market. 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.”
