Visa’s Developer Platform Begins With An ‘I’

Developers looking to get their innovation payments enabled and widely distributed have a number of options from which to choose. But with the launch of Visa’s Developer Platform, Visa EVP of Technology Rajat Taneja explains to MPD CEO Karen Webster that creating game changing innovations starts with embracing the one critical thing that they believe most fail to deliver: interoperability.

“The industry is certainly at an inflection point.”

The influence of connected smart devices, the use of geolocation technologies, increasing computational power, and technologies that allow these devices to harness the effectiveness of data in real-time and at scale, Taneja believes have “come together at this point in time to make this a very unique moment for our industry.”

But as much potential as these innovations hold for the future of payments and commerce, Taneja asserts that there’s still one major point of failure: nearly $11 trillion in cash is still being used for various transactions worldwide.

Moving beyond the inflection point, therefore, Visa and Taneja believe, is all about accelerating the expansion of digital payments by doing one thing that they believe is holding back the wheels of progress: making it easier for new technologies to be integrated into new payments and commerce endpoints – securely.

Prioritizing Interoperability

For Visa, moving beyond the inflection point is about being open – and interoperable – and a philosophy that appears to be at the core of the Visa Developer Platform, unveiled yesterday (Feb. 4) at the company’s event in San Francisco.

The platform’s goal is to encourage developers to create a variety of new applications and new scenarios to help consumers, merchants and businesses conduct commerce in a secure and compliant way – a development that Visa CEO Charlie Scharf called  “an extraordinarily important milestone” in the company’s shift from “a leader of commerce in the physical world to a leader of commerce in the connected world.”

Taneja describes The Visa Developer Platform as opening up the depth and breadth of the world’s largest payments network via “ hundreds and hundreds of elemental units of service, now exposed as APIs using standard language protocols while embracing all programming languages.”

The result, Taneja explains, is “a very open environment which has interoperability built in.”

That interoperability, which Visa considers to be one of the most significant design principles of the platform, will allow developers to create “ensemble applications” that can assemble a variety of APIs across multiple products, both from Visa and other platforms.

“To really create awesome applications, it takes a village, it takes platforms that are doing different functions for compliance, for regulatory reasons, for security, for scale and for them to work together in a cohesive manner,” Taneja added.

Taneja believes that this openness is what sets the Visa Developer Platform apart, but also makes it easier for developers to simply and easily leverage a multitude of platforms both within and outside of the payments industry.

Trial partner VenueNext has seen this firsthand as it prepares to launch an app for NFL fans attending the Super Bowl this Sunday (Feb 7).

“At the moment, we integrate 25 different backends into our system at Levi’s Stadium and the less time we can spend on integrating those, the better we can do,” explains VenueNext CEO John Paul. “And as we move to other venues — Land of Magic at Amway, AT&T Park for the Dallas Cowboys — how quickly we can integrate because of your work really helps us as a business,” he continued.

Keeping Openness Secure

With the initial launch of the Developer Platform, nearly 140 APIs will be available to developers.

But that’s just the beginning, Taneja says. As Visa builds new capabilities for its own products, it will release new APIs that correspond to those new capabilities, making its developer’s platform an ever-evolving snapshot of how the world of connected commerce itself is evolving.

The Visa Developer Platform is also expected to include community support for developers that will facilitate dialogue and sharing, as well as a marketplace where new applications created through the platform can live.

But openness can be a double-edged sword. During the course of a conversation with Taneja ahead of the launch, Webster asked whether the CTO of the world’s largest payments network had any (or many) sleepless nights over its decision to open up what is the world’s largest payments network for developers to play around with.

“Job No. 1 for my team and I is the security of our platform and the profound obligation to the data we have from our issuing banks, merchants and consumers. Protecting that is a higher priority over everything else,” Taneja emphasized.  A job, he emphasized that involves the monitoring and tracking of the nearly 6 billion daily events that take place inside its network, access points and applications at every device level, application level and data level.

Taneja went on to explain that Visa utilizes what he described as layered protection, which uses abstraction layers that disconnect Visa’s core network and application from the APIs that developers access. “Cornering off” the network in specific segments that use firewalls and other technologies to ensure external access means that access is never granted to internal network components.

“What we’re really talking about is opening the edge of the network in a different way, so there’s really not a security implication,” said Visa SVP Jack Forestell on the day of the announcement. “In a lot of ways, this can massively help us enhance security by getting the end user more involved in the security equation through their connected devices.”

Crafting New Commerce Experiences

Although the covers were taken off Visa’s Developer Platform yesterday, Visa has already seen its power in action.

A November hackathon used a beta version of the platform to get the creative juices flowing from a handful of engineers eager for the opportunity to play around with its APIs.

“Looking at the applications themselves, they are so inspiring because it’s the passion and ideas from those that are on the frontlines and how they want to create new capabilities for their customers,” Taneja said while describing the almost 200 applications that Visa has on hand thus far.

From card validation to tokenization service, account funding transactions from one person to pay the other person and even mobile location confirmation, the innovation possibilities touch on all aspects of the payments space.

“The applications built vary across an entire spectrum, from applications that create value for those who might be visually impaired when they are doing commerce to applications that enable remote payments, to those that allow better donation capabilities for charities or even recurring payments,” Taneja added.

While it may be easy to measure the success of Visa’s developer platform on the basis of feedback from developers about how easy it is to access their APIs or even how many or what type of applications have been built,  Visa’s own definition of success has a much higher bar.

“At the end of the day, the biggest success is seeing the profound innovation that happens for digital connected commerce using our platform and seeing the applications that are developed either by our banks, acquirers, merchants and by partners and other developers out there,” Taneja said.