Visa has announced the European launch of Visa Direct – a real-time payments platform that allows companies to leverage Visa’s global reach and scale to transform domestic and cross-border payments for businesses and consumers. Services

Real-time time service

Visa Direct enables person-to-person (P2P), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) payments. With Visa Direct, funds can be transferred into the recipient’s Visa account quickly, conveniently, and securely – providing instant access to funds and the ability to make purchases at 44 million retail locations worldwide.

The Visa Direct platform is available in more than 200 markets around the world and can be used to reach more than one billion consumer card accounts globally. Available through a comprehensive Visa Direct API library, financial institutions and technology partners can quickly build real-time payment solutions through a feature-rich suite of web services on the Visa Developer Platform.

Visa in Europe has announced a mandate that requires card issuers to enable real-time payments by October 2018. Real-time payments states that funds need to be sent by issuers to cardholders no later than 30 minutes from a transaction being approved.

First partner in Europe

Visa has partnered with Worldpay, a global leader in payments processing technology and solutions for merchants, to accelerate the availability of Visa Direct to merchants in Europe and subsequently across all of its markets globally. Once recipient banks make required changes to their systems, Visa Direct will enable Worldpay’s merchants to send real-time payments to consumers – improving customer satisfaction.

Usage in Europe and world-wide  

Visa Direct is expected to transform payments in Europe by enabling a range of real-time payment use cases backed by the security and scale of Visa’s global payment network, including:

• Business-to-consumer: enabling businesses to send almost any kind of payment directly to a Visa account – such as gaming winnings, insurance payouts, and daily merchant settlements.
• Business-to-business: enabling businesses to pay freelancers, contractors, and other small businesses – in real time.
• Person-to-person: enabling consumers to pay each other quickly, conveniently, and securely, often through their connected devices – such as when splitting bills or giving gifts.

In the US, Visa Direct is already enabling payments for partners such as PayPal, Braintree, Square Cash, and Stripe.

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CTMfile take: Real-time payments are becoming the norm, so Visa had to join the party.