The enhanced service has the potential to eliminate paper coupons, allowing consumers, who opt in, to earn points and discounts as well as redeem special offers instantly at checkout by simply using their enrolled Visa card. The platform supports Visa's commitment to offer solutions for retailer and financial institution clients of any size that allows them to deliver customized and differentiated benefits to Visa cardholders at the point-of-sale.

Visa's payments processing network, VisaNet, enables the efficient delivery of these offers that can enhance the consumer checkout experience, increase merchant sales and strengthen issuer relationships. The new capabilities include:

Fully Customizable Offer Content
Retailers and financial institutions can deliver offers that are tailored to individual customers, through email, web and mobile. For example, a clothing retailer could deliver a personalized text message or email to customers who have opted in to the program while they are shopping nearby.

Real-Time Offer Relevancy
The platform also provides retailers and issuers data insights and analytics to measure the point-of-sale redemption rate, allowing them to create customized and more relevant offers.

Consumer Loyalty Qualification
Through the enhancement of the Visa Offers platform, retailers and issuers can use real-time messaging capabilities to identify and uniquely reward loyal customers.

Multiple Redemption Options
Enhancements to the Visa Offers platform include support for real-time redemption of offers and rewards at the point-of-sale. This complements the existing statement credit capability.

Support for Multiple Offers Programs
The Visa Offers platform supports both Visa-specific and third-party offer programs to help drive incremental purchases and a faster, more seamless checkout experience for consumers, who provide their consent.

"Smarter commerce means having the right offer, delivered to the right customer at the right time," said Jim McCarthy, global head of Products, Visa Inc. "Visa's new real-time point-of-sale redemption platform is a great example of Visa's ability to apply its processing and technology expertise to simplify the use of offers and discounts, bringing benefits to merchants, acquirers, issuers and consumers. This enhancement to Visa's processing platform is emblematic of our strategy to facilitate our clients differentiating benefits for their customers at the point-of-sale."

Visa has established agreements to source discounts from leading retailers and can manage the Visa Offers platform on behalf of retailers, acquirers, and issuers, from enrollment to offer delivery to redemption options.

"From hardware designs to software enhancements, it has never been more important for the payments industry to find meaningful ways to enhance the consumer experience," said Nick Holland, senior payments analyst, Javelin Strategy & Research. "Visa has a long history of delivering payment tools that transform the ways consumers shop, and Visa's new offers redemption platform is another innovative example of making the payment process more efficient for banks, merchants and consumers."