Visa Reveals Digital Products to be Launched Over the Year Catering to Evolving Consumer Demands

Consumer payment preferences are constantly evolving, meaning firms need to adapt to cater to these needs. At the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, Visa has unveiled new products which will address the evolving consumer payments demands.

“The industry is at a pivotal point – new technologies like Gen AI are rapidly shifting how we shop and manage our finances,” said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer, Visa. “We’re announcing the next generation of truly digital-native payment card experiences. Today we unveiled new card features and digital innovations that will bring consumers into a more customised, convenient and secure future.”

The new products and services Visa unveiled will begin to roll out later this year.

Visa Flexible Credential

A Visa study found that more than half of card users want the power to access multiple accounts through a single credential. The Visa Flexible Credential will allow a single card product to toggle between payment methods, putting the power of choice in the hands of the consumer.

As a result, consumers can  set parameters or choose whether they use debit, credit, ‘pay-in-four’ with Buy Now Pay Later or even pay using rewards points. Visa Flexible Credential is live in Asia and will be launching with Affirm later this summer in the US.

Tap to Everything

There are six billion mobile devices in the world providing consumers with a versatile NFC enabled device primed to be ‘tapped’. At the end of 2023, Visa’s tap-to-pay penetration reached 65 per cent globally, up two times the penetration we saw in 2019, cementing tap as one of the best commerce experiences today.

This year, new ways to ‘tap’ on a mobile device will become an integral part of the Visa experience.

• Tap to Pay: Any device can now be a POS device
• Tap to Confirm: Easily authenticates identity when shopping online
• Tap to Add Card: Enhances security when adding card into a wallet or app
• Tap to P2P (person-to-person): Allows money to be sent between family and friends

Visa Payment Passkey Service

Identifying a person in the digital world has become incredibly complex and has resulted in a significant increase in fraud. Online payment fraud is seven times higher than in-person payments.

Built on the latest Fast Identity Online (FIDO) standards, the Visa Payment Passkey Service confirms a consumer’s identity and authorises online payments with a quick scan of their biometrics like a face or fingerprint. When shopping online, Visa passkeys replace the need for passwords or one-time codes, enabling more streamlined, secure transactions.

“There is a global desire to find commonality, interoperability and simplicity for online payments. Our passkeys, designed specifically for payments, represent a massive paradigm shift in our industry because it confirms identity without interrupting the checkout experience,” said Forestell. “Visa Payment Passkey Service increases security while reducing friction when you pay online, across any device or website, globally.”

Click to Pay + Visa Payment Passkey Service

As its first deployment of passkeys, Visa is integrating Visa Payment Passkey Service into Click to Pay, powering a more seamless and secure checkout experience at scale. Additionally, in many markets around the world, Visa will partner with issuers to enable Click to Pay and Visa Payment Passkey Service on new Visa cards, reducing manual entry of card details and passwords from the moment the card arrives.

Pay by Bank

Non-card payments don’t deliver the same experience, security and protections as card-based payments. Electronic payments, like ACH transfers, have been left out of the digital revolution. With pay by bank, the payments provider is digitising the account-to-account (A2A) payments experience. It will give people more choice over how they want to pay, whether that’s an A2A transfer, applying for a loan or paying with another funding source, like a credit card.

Since its acquisition of Tink, Visa has expanded across Europe, giving millions of bank customers innovative financial management tools and removing friction from their payment experiences. Visa is bringing this new technology to the US to help its clients deliver additional seamless, protected banking experiences.

Visa Protect for A2A Payments

The payments giant sees over 200 billion transactions every year and analyses 500 data elements in every transaction to identify and stop fraud in real-time. Working with Real-Time Payments (RTP) networks around the world, we are overlaying decades of Visa expertise in applying AI to help mitigate fraud for account-to-account payments on RTP networks. Live in Latin America and piloting in the UK, Visa Protect for A2A Payments is already identifying 60 per cent of RTP fraud and scams previously undetected by financial institutions.

Data Tokens

For the last 10 years, Visa has added security to the payments ecosystem by tokenising payments, removing sensitive cardholder account information from the payment flow. Twenty-nine per cent of all transactions processed by Visa are tokenised, with widescale adoption by merchants and issuers in nearly every market globally.

As new data regulations create a guide for better consumer data privacy practices, and Gen AI transforms how we discover things online, the company believes that payment data has a role to play in delivering these new and improved experiences – and that consumers should be empowered to have more control too. Using its tokenisation infrastructure, Visa will offer a new way for people to control their data and receive better shopping experiences, powered by AI.

Visa data tokens let consumers, whose financial institution participates in the program, consent to sharing their data as they shop online, then see where it’s been shared and revoke access right from their banking app. With data tokens, the payments organisation and participating banks can enable an experience where a merchant can request consent from the consumer to get more personalised offers as they shop.

If the consumer agrees, behind the scenes, Visa issues a private data token to the merchant complete with AI-generated insights based on the consumer’s transaction data. The data token can be used with the merchant’s AI models to deliver real-time recommendations for the shopper. The company will also pass the data token to the consumer’s bank to capture where the data has been shared, so the consumer can easily review where it has been shared in their mobile banking app and revoke access if they choose.