Visa Opens Developer Centre For Online Tools

Online payments giant Visa has launched the Visa Developer Center to give developers the tools to produce e-commerce, mobile and social network payment systems.

Visa officials said the new Visa Developer Center offers e-commerce and mobile application developers a pathway to create a seamless online purchase experience for consumers. Whether enabling the purchase of small in-game digital goods, or the latest appliance from a big-box retailer, to enabling purchases with Visa’s new digital wallet, developers now have access to APIs, simplified documentation and SDKs needed to make online shopping with Visa fast, simple and secure, the company said.

Buying Revolution

“The convergence of Web, mobile and social networks is revolutionising the way people buy and sell, and is driving the creation of new and innovative ways to pay,” Jim McCarthy, global head of products at Visa, said in a statement. “The Visa Developer Center ensures that application developers, especially those constructing e-commerce, mobile, and social applications, have access to Visa capabilities, while still maintaining Visa’s industry-leading security standards.”

The new Visa Developer Center provides access to the payment expertise, open APIs, and development tools offered by Visa and its subsidiaries, CyberSource, Authorize.Net and PlaySpan. It will enable e-commerce merchants, financial institutions, mobile network operators and gaming developers to integrate Visa payment functionality into their product offerings, including the next generation of payment solutions through V.me by Visa.

Visa is taking the first step in making its digital wallet and new acceptance mark available with the launch of developer tools that can be accessed through the Visa Developer Center or at https://www.v.me/. V.me by Visa will offer a secure way for consumers to pay online as well as in person with a PC, tablet or mobile device using Visa and non-Visa accounts.

The new system is designed to support the evolving ways and places people are transacting, V.me will also provide features beyond payments such as transaction alerts and the ability to receive personalised offers triggered in real time, the company said. Accessing V.me will be as simple as click-to-buy on a computer, touch-to-buy for a mobile browser, and wave-to-buy for physical point-of-sale near-field communication (NFC) transactions.

Mobile Payments

Meanwhile, to accelerate adoption of and support for innovative applications using V.me, Visa is creating an open beta developer program designed initially for e-commerce payment applications. The site will enable developers to provision API credentials and access the dedicated sandbox, dynamically generate code samples to insert into applications, create and integrate merchant e-commerce sites (with sandbox testing) and provide simplified Web-based documentation.

The new Visa Developer Center also will help developers create person-to-person payments, and domestic and international remittances. It offers easy access to the building blocks that extend person-to-person payment services to include Visa cards. These building blocks include APIs for Visa account validation, currency conversion, transaction initiation and anti-money-laundering tools.

The new developer center also lets developers enable mobile payments and services. Providing consumers with a way to make mobile payments and access their financial accounts has become a priority for banks and mobile-network operators around the world. The new Visa Developer Center will provide mobile developers with the tools to create applications that transform a mobile phone into a payment or merchant acceptance device, Visa said.