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Visa Inc. on Wednesday said eight merchant acquirers and e-commerce platform providers will be rolling out the 1-month-old Visa Checkout online and mobile payment service. With three platform providers already offering the service, up to 4 million U.S. online merchants will be able use Visa Checkout, Visa claims.
The acquirers include such major names as Bank of America Merchant Services, First Data Corp., Total System Services Inc. (TSYS), Vantiv Inc., and Wells Fargo Merchant Services. The e-commerce services firms include Visa subsidiary CyberSource, MarketLive, and 3DCart. Already live with Visa Checkout are platforms Branding Brand, Moovweb, and Skava.
Visa last month replaced its V.me digital-wallet service with the more streamlined Visa Checkout in an effort to gain traction in a market niche that has seen many digital and mobile wallets struggle. Visa said some leading merchants such as Neiman Marcus, Pizza Hut, Petco, Ticketmaster, Staples, United Airlines, and some others had committed to using Visa Checkout, and that 180 financial institutions would offer it to their cardholders.
This week, Visa played up how the acquirer agreements could bring Visa Checkout to millions more merchants. “When we designed Visa Checkout, we wanted to ensure that the Visa Checkout button could be broadly integrated into all of consumers’ favorite online and mobile Web sites across the Web, whatever their size,” Sam Shrauger, Visa’s senior vice president of digital solutions, said in a blog post. “Today, we are proud to announce that we are delivering on this promise through several agreements with some of the leading acquirers and e-commerce platform providers that service merchants of all sizes across the Web.”
Shrauger, a former PayPal executive, tells Digital Transactions News by email that he expects more acquirers to sign on to facilitate Visa Checkout for their merchants. “Acquirer and e-commerce platform providers have shown a strong interest in making Visa Checkout available to consumers as shown by [the recent] agreements,” he says.
Asked how Visa Checkout differs from V.me, Shrauger says the new service is “an entirely reimagined and reengineered online checkout service that helps consumers pay, and merchants accept payments online, simply and easily. It provides a consistent experience across desktop, mobile Web, and apps … V.me was built three years ago, and since that time, online and, particularly, mobile commerce has grown and changed rapidly. Visa Checkout is optimized for this new online and mobile world.”
Coming from the leading payment card network, Visa Checkout will be attractive to many acquirers, predicts senior analyst Rick Oglesby of Centennial, Colo.-based Double Diamond Payments Research. But the service still will face stiff competition, starting with merchants’ online services, MasterCard Inc.’s MasterPass wallet platform, which Citigroup Inc. rolled out this week, and many others.
“Visa Checkout is competing with merchants’ own account-on-file relationships as well as with the more established online wallets, primarily PayPal, and with browser-based form fillers such as Safari Keychain and Chrome AutoFill,” Oglesby says by email. “Considering the competition, Visa is a good alternative from the point of view of an acquirer … so we can expect progress on these fronts.”
The ultimate success of Visa Checkout will depend on how Visa, with its issuers, acquirers, and e-commerce processors. can affect consumer behavior at the point of purchase, says Oglesby. “The big unanswered question is how will Visa and its partners influence consumers to change how they have been purchasing online for the last 15-plus years? Considering that Visa and its partners wield little influence over point-of-purchase interactions, this will be a big challenge.”
