Visa Reinvents the Card, Unveils New Products for Digital Age

The way people pay and get paid has changed more in the past five years than in the last 50. Consumers have evolved, adapting to new payment experiences – from the advent of embedded, digital commerce to the rapid adoption of “the tap.” Visa is announcing a suite of new products and services that will be available in Asia Pacific. These solutions are set to revolutionize the card and address the future needs of businesses, merchants and consumers, and the financial institutions that serve them.

“Innovation in our industry is vital as payments serve as the fundamental vehicle of commerce enabling economies to thrive,” said Stephen Karpin, Regional President, Asia Pacific, Visa. “There is a huge opportunity for the payments ecosystem to shape new digital experiences together. It is more critical than ever that we partner and collaborate closely to unlock meaningful value and impact for consumers, merchants and local communities.”

“We are seeing a rapid transformation in the way consumers shop and manage their information in today’s hyper-digitalized era,” said TR Ramachandran, Head of Products and Solutions, Asia Pacific, Visa. “The new solutions that are unveiled today will bring truly digital-native payment experiences right into consumers’ palms, setting the stage where commerce is made much more personalized, convenient and secure.”

The new products and services Visa unveiled today, which will begin to roll out later this year across Asia Pacific, include:

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. Now people can easily set parameters or choose whether they use debit, credit, “pay-in-four” with Buy Now Pay Later or even pay using rewards points all via the same, single Visa credential. In Asia Pacific, Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company (SMCC) was the first bank to adopt this solution, which is also known as “Olive” to SMCC’s cardholders . The solution is currently available in Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, and will be launched in more Asia Pacific markets later this year.

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% 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 Phone : 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. Today, 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 enables a consumer to verify and authenticate their identity, and authorize online payments, with a quick scan of their biometrics like their face or fingerprint using authentication tools made available on their devices. When shopping online, Visa passkeys replace the need for passwords or one-time codes, enabling more streamlined and secure transactions. Visa plans to roll out the Visa Payment Passkey Service in selected Asia Pacific markets in the coming years.

Click to Pay

Guest checkouts have been particularly cumbersome for many consumers as they manually enter their card information and undergo verification processes on eCommerce platforms. Click to Pay eliminates this tedious process, powering a more seamless and secure checkout experience at scale. The solution enables consumers to complete online transactions within a few clicks by selecting which of their pre-enrolled Visa cards they’d like to pay with. Additionally, in many markets across Asia Pacific, Visa will partner with issuers to enable Click to Pay on new Visa cards, reducing manual entry of card details and passwords from the moment the card arrives.

Data Tokens

For the last 10 years, Visa has added security to the payments ecosystem by tokenizing payments, removing sensitive cardholder account information from the payment flow. Today, Visa has crossed the 1 billion mark in tokens issued across Asia Pacific, with widescale adoption by merchants and issuers in the region . As new data regulations create a guide for better consumer data privacy practices, and Gen AI transforms how we discover things online, Visa 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 tokenization 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, Visa and participating banks can enable an experience where a merchant can request consent from the consumer to get more personalized 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. Visa 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.