Visa Opens Scores of Its APIs to Developers in a Bid To Speed Payments Innovation

In a move that recognizes the powerful role application developers play in the global payments arena, Visa Inc. on Thursday opened scores of its application programming interfaces to thousands of outsiders worldwide, including merchants, banks, and technology companies.

The new program, called Visa Developer, embraces some 155 APIs and includes such new services as Visa Checkout, Visa Alerts, and Visa Direct, a person-to-person payments app. It also features a so-called sandbox that will let developers test new apps before releasing them into the marketplace.

Initial users include a number of financial institutions, among them Capital One Financial Corp. and U.S. Bancorp, as well as a major processor, Total System Services Inc. (TSYS), and an app developer, VenueNext Inc., whose product will allow fans at Sunday’s Super Bowl game to order concessions and have them delivered to their seats.

“This is a very exciting and very important time for Visa,” said Charles Scharf, the card network’s chief executive, in a press conference to announce the move. “We’re a platform others can build upon.”

Visa executives at the press conference stressed the need among app developers to create and bring products to market much faster than in the past to satisfy user demand and meet competitive pressure. Access to Visa technology, they said, fulfills that need by replacing semi-annual software releases with immediate availability. “Access to our network was very controlled, our network was a closed network,” said Rajat Taneja, Visa’s executive vice president of technology. “Today we are giving direct access to these individual services.”

The new open approach can also allow banks to catch up in such products as mobile wallets, where they have depended so far on technology companies like Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit. “We see [wallets] as table stakes,” said Tom Poole, managing vice president for digital at Capital One, which relied on the beta version of Visa’s developer platform to access tokenization technology for a mobile wallet it introduced in October. “We almost felt we were late to the game. There’s something strange in the industry where you’re not turning to a bank for payments.”

Visa’s move may include much of the company’s latest payments technology, but it’s not the first time a major payments company or network has opened its system to outside developers. PayPal Holdings Inc., at the time a unit of eBay Inc., opened its APIs to outsiders in 2009, followed by MasterCard Inc. in 2010.

Indeed, Visa in October 2010 introduced a developer center for its Authorize.Net online-payments unit, which allowed developers to create applications and link to VisaNet, the company’s backbone processing software.