Visa rolls out real-time payments platform in Europe

Visa is to bring its real-time payments platform to market in Europe after experiencing strong growth in other key markets globally.

Visa Direct enables person-to-person (P2P), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) payments with funds transfers to recipient accounts taking place within minutes.

For the European roll-out, Visa has partnered with Worldpay to equip merchants with the capability to send real-time payments to consumers. The card scheme is also releasing an API on its developer platform to help bank and merchant clients implement the technology.

To further push take-up, Visa in Europe has announced a mandate that requires card issuers to enable real-time payments by October 2018.

In other global markets where the technology is already available, Visa Direct saw volumes increase by 75% over last year. In the US, the platform enables push payments for a host of partners, including PayPal, Braintree, Square Cash, and Stripe.

Mike Lemberger, SVP of product solutions, Visa in Europe, comments: “Visa Direct is a proven platform that enables technology companies, businesses and financial institutions to meet the demand for real-time payments, backed by the ubiquity, cost-efficiency and speed of Visa’s global network.”

Related Companies

Visa WorldPay

Channels

Retail banking Payments

Keywords

Cards Mobile & online banking E-commerce Eftpos

Comments: (3)

A Finextra member 02 November, 2017, 10:31

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The Empire strikes back (at PSD2)?.. Once, a similar platform for A2A payments is implemented, merchants will have an interesting choice.

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A Finextra member 02 November, 2017, 11:06

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Interesting to see how this compares with SCTinst based products (the imminent universal, open account to account standard in Europe); the card channel is already connected to merchants through an extensive network and this may be useful for refunds and a couple of other "quasi-push" payment use cases, it is hardly a univerasl payment instrument. If enabling cross-currency flows this may also be an advantage over ACH (for now). Howevre, high value B2B payments would be quite risky or necessitate unusual levels of guarantees from Visa and/or Issuers on a system unless the underlying DNS settlment is upgraded to mirror the central bank-backed mechanism used by ACHs for Instant Payments. It delivers value to the payer in a leisurely 30 minutes making it not ideal for DVP based payments in the B2B, C2B and SMe domains.

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Roberto Garavaglia - Innovative Payments & blockchain Strategic Advisor - Milan 02 November, 2017, 17:44

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I'm not convinced about what Finextra reports on the B2B Visa Direct solution.

As far as I understand, Visa Direct enables a sort of "card-to-card push payments" only for the B2C and P2P case, that's in the case where the beneficiary has its own Card Account (in US a prepaid card).