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Visa Inc. on Wednesday unveiled enhancements intended to further remove friction from the customers’ payment experience for merchants of all sizes. The enhancements, which are being launched on Visa’s Acceptance Platform, were developed in response to merchants’ needs for simpler implementation of payments technology, Visa says.
The enhancements include Developer Assist, an artificial intelligence-based tool to help software engineers develop sophisticated payment flows, answer questions on testing and certification, and suggest sample code.
The Visa Acceptance platform is used by more than 450 payment-service providers and connects to more than 100 independent software vendors supporting more than 450,000 active merchants each month in 160 countries, according to Visa.
In addition, Authorize.net, a wholly owned subsidiary of Visa, has enhanced its user interface to make data more accessible through dashboards and other search functions. The enhancement is intended to help merchants and partners streamline day-to-day business operations.
Visa also announced it is piloting new Tap to Phone technology in Latin America and the Caribbean that allows consumers to tap their cards to their own devices to pay for online purchases. Visa’s Tap to Phone solution, which allows merchants to accept contactless payments using a certified smart phone, is live in 121 countries with more than 6.7 million active terminals and more than $8.5 billion in payment volume on a 12-month basis as of March of this year.
“The past few years have had a profound and lasting impact on the commerce strategies for merchants of every shape and size. Consumers desire immediacy and increasingly expect digitally evolved experiences,” Jordan McKee, research director for 451 Research, says in a statement. “To keep pace with this trend, merchants are now looking for partners to help them simplify their ability to maintain connectivity to the ecosystem.”
Visa Acceptance Solutions is intended to provide businesses with improved connectivity and flexibility that businesses can’t build on their own without heavy technology investment.
“The payments sector has made significant strides in simplifying the consumer shopping experience. In doing so, the payments ecosystem has become more complex and fragmented for sellers,” Rob Cameron, global head of Acceptance Solutions for Visa says in a statement. The new acceptance technology, he adds, will enable advanced payment options for merchants “without over-indexing on complexity for themselves.”
