VisaNet

The technology behind Visa

Fifty years ago, Visa had a vision: To provide consumers, businesses and governments around the world with a better form of payment. The technology behind this vision is VisaNet, a proprietary transaction processing network.

VisaNet today connects:

• 2 billion cards
• Millions of merchant outlets

Today, Visa offers a comprehensive set of payment products and services. Visa-branded credit, debit, commercial, prepaid, mobile, and money transfer products are a leading choice of cardholders and financial institutions in 200 countries and territories. VisaNet also makes it possible for us to deliver the latest innovations for an increasingly mobile society, providing consumers with mobile financial services, such as mobile payments, money transfer, and top-up services.

What is VisaNet?

VisaNet supports economic empowerment to people, businesses, banks, and governments in 200 countries and territories.

VisaNet: Connecting the world through electronic payments

Around the world, there continues to be a steady migration from cash and checks to electronic payments for every need. Consumers and businesses have discovered electronic payments offer them levels of convenience, reliability, and security that are unmatched by any other form of payment.

Visa has provided electronic payments to business and consumers for decades, constantly investing to increase their convenience, reliability, security, and value. The technology behind Visa is our global network: VisaNet. For nations all over the world, this proprietary payments network already provides:

• An instant connection to the global economy for governments, central banks, domestic financial institutions, and merchants.

Products and Services Enabled by VisaNet

VisaNet

The world’s largest electronic payment network

As more people, more businesses, merchants, and governments have adopted electronic payments, greater demand has been placed on the infrastructure required to process these transactions. As a leading global payments technology company, Visa continues to enhance its payments processing network, which today is capable of handling more than 24,000 transaction messages per second with reliability, convenience, and security.

VisaNet is a centralized and modular payments network, providing three essential functions in one complete, flexible package:

• Fast: Transactions processed in less than one second
• Secure: Reliable over the years, Visa has applied technology to provide our clients with information, efficiencies, and global connectivity.
• Scalable: Includes authorization & clearing transactions for payment and cash disbursements.
• Flexible

Transaction Processing Services

• More than 150 million transactions every day authorized in 175 currencies
• Globally, unsurpassed merchant acceptance of Visa as a form of payment
• Sophisticated, automated dispute resolution, minimizing cost and time needed to handle disputed transactions

Risk Management Services

• Protection from fraud, theft, or unauthorized use for issuers, acquirers, and merchants alike
• real-time fraud scoring and multiple layers of security against data theft and misuse

Information Services

• Fraud remains near historic lows, less than six cents per $100 transacted on Visa products, despite huge increases in network volume
• Transform transaction data into actionable information and business intelligence
• Help businesses make informed procurement decisions, optimize revenues and business processes, and enrich the cardholder experience
• Allow banks and merchants to offer personalized cardholder rewards and send Visa transaction alerts directly to consumers via SMS text message
• Empower governments and businesses to better manage expenditures and ensure funds go where they should, and help spot potential waste, fraud, or abuse

Impact of Visa

Financial Inclusion

Thirty-four million Indians join the banking mainstream yearly, including Kunal Chheda. Visa debit helped Kunal go cashless, leaving worry behind. Now he pays bills, shops the Internet, and books travel in minutes.

Saving Governments Money

When the Dominican Republic switched to Visa prepaid for public services, funds for the basics could be reloaded easily. Maria Alta Gracia Reyes gets better benefits; the government saves money.

Cross Border and International Processing

VisaNet’s centralized, modular network offers something few other payment networks can: a complete, customizable processing package that can deliver precisely the products, services, and features demanded by any nation or any central bank. In an effort to enable banks in a domestic market to offer domestic payment products and diversify their product portfolio, Visa has formed a joint venture, Visa Processing Services (VPS). VPS provides domestic processing solutions — including multi-currency and multi-language debit, credit, and prepaid issuer processing services — to financial institutions in Asia Pacific, Latin America, Canada, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Government responsiveness

Visa rebuilds lives. Fazal Mahmood and 1.5 million Pakistanis were displaced by fighting. The government turned to Visa for efficient, secure relief. Now, Fazal shops with Visa prepaid.

Merchant Benefits

The owners of Commerce restaurant in Manhattan would rather cook than count cash — so they removed the register and went with electronic payments only. Business is convenient, secure, and booming.

Domestic Processing

The convenience, security, and transparency of electronics payments also help to bring people out of the informal economy, thus increasing a nation’s economic activity while assisting with proper administration and collection of taxes. Electronic payments also enable governments to distribute benefits to thousands in need, as well as reduce the costs and complexity of everything from purchasing to payroll. Visa provides governments and businesses alike with solutions that deliver greater efficiency, transparency, accountability, and control.

• Prepaid Benefits Disbursement – Deliver child support funds, food purchasing assistance, welfare benefits, and retirement pensions to millions of people in countries as diverse as the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, and the United States.
• Domestic and Cross-Border Remittances – Streamline the process of moving funds between individuals and across borders, safely bringing overseas wages to family members at home.

A History of Visa Innovation

• 1975: Support for first debit card
• 1992: Launch of Visa Check Card
• 1977: First data center opened
• 1973: Launch of the first electronic authorization system (BASE I)
• 1974: Launch of the first electronic clearing and settlement system (BASE II)
• 1993: First international prepaid card, Visa TravelMoney
• 1983: Launches global ATM network
• 1986: First payment card system to offer multiple-currency clearing and settlement

Decades of continuous investment and innovation

Since the creation of VisaNet, Visa has kept ahead of the constant evolution of electronic payments through the investment of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars into its payments network. This commitment has enabled Visa to continuously deliver advanced payment products and services.

This investment has allowed us to apply innovation and new technologies and implement a flexible and modern transactions-processing architecture and operating system. Our technology has let us evolve electronic payments in ways that make lives easier for people, while delivering increased value to financial institutions, merchants, and governments over cash and checks.

Visa’s continued focus on innovation applies to all aspects of electronic payments, including:

• Processing: Visa has conducted two major system upgrades each year for the past 20 years, in coordination with thousands of financial institutions, merchants, and processors around the world. Our recent upgrade in core operating system and processing memory gives VisaNet significantly improved processing speeds and a new degree of scalability.

• eCommerce: Visa was an early pioneer in eCommerce, developing solutions that will reshape the consumer online shopping experience. VisaNet supports services that allow consumers to shop at merchants across borders, and provide a secure payment choice for all types of eCommerce transactions. V.me by Visa, a wallet service by Visa, delivers the simplicity, security, and personalization that merchants, financial institutions, and consumers demand as eCommerce and mCommerce converge.

• Personal Payments: Visa personal payments represent a significant opportunity for financial institutions to offer their customers a safe, reliable, and fast way to send and receive money from friends or family members. These transfers can be initiated by using VisaNet’s existing infrastructure and endpoints, including ATMs, the Internet, or by simply visiting a bank branch.

• Products and Services: VisaNet provides a complete range of payment products and services that can be tailored to the needs of consumers, financial institutions, and merchants. These include credit, debit, prepaid, and commercial payment products, as well as risk and other information-based services that provide efficiency and transparency.

• White Label Processing: Visa can provide its processing services to select clients as the foundation for their own branded offerings. Businesses and governments can thus take advantage of the speed, convenience, and security of VisaNet, yet maintain their own look and feel, branding, and network marks.

Conclusion

VisaNet today delivers the benefits of electronic payments to nearly a quarter of the world's population and on every continent. It offers a wide range of products and services in a completely flexible and customizable package. As electronic payments increasingly replace cash and checks at the heart of the global economy, central banks and countries can rely on Visa to continue to invest in keeping VisaNet one of the world's most advanced payment networks.