Mobility: Visa Keeps Structuring Its Offer

Visa partners with transit operators, car rental companies, fuel providers and airlines to present their “Transportation Center of Excellence”. The idea is to rethink customers’ journeys and streamline their payment processes, whichever means of transportation they use. Visa tries to centralise innovative solutions, through making their APIs available and, by doing so, become a reference player when it comes to mobility-related payments.

This new program will be relying on all Visa services: Visa Token Service, Visa Ready for Transit (for digital ticketing services), and even Visa Global Transit Solutions (in charge of implementing contactless payment solution for the public transport industry). The point is to design new ways consumers can access and pay for transportation.

Visa is for instance considering an in-car payment feature for fuel, insurance or even food orders. They also plan to partner with start-ups on designing payment and search technologies for car parking. Other projects for airlines and public transportation include implementing contactless payment features for next-generation transports.

This program is made available to all companies and managed from an innovation centre in London. It will help developers choose an API or SDK, through the Visa Developer Platform, and create mobility and transports-dedicated commerce apps.

Comments – On-the-go payments for tomorrow

Urban mobility is one of the first industries to have been impacted by digital changes. Visa intends to handle all resulting behavioural adjustments, and several partnerships have already been announced as they aim to propose relevant services for these new use cases. The card scheme hasn’t given up working on the card sector. In fact, they try to improve traditional payment tools’ interoperability with next-generation solutions (especially mobile and connected devices). Other related announcements have been made at the Mobile World Congress.

Also, it isn’t the first time this payments Behemoth invests in the travel industry. According to the results they reported for their latest partnership with Transport for London, more than one billion journeys have been paid for with a contactless Visa card. Now, Visa plans to become a central interlocutor on this vertical.