Nearly 20% of all in-person Visa card transactions in the US are now contactless, with that proportion rising to more than 25% in Los Angeles, Detroit, Orange County, Miami and Salt Lake City, over 30% in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, and reaching 45% in New York, according to the card network’s Q1 2022 earnings call. visa contactless 

Visa also reported that nearly one in four face-to-face card payments in Brazil were contactless (24%), a rise of 19 percentage points from 5% for the previous year and that tap-to-pay transactions in India have “nearly doubled” to 16% between 2019 and the end of the 2021 fiscal year.

In addition, the card network identified growth in the buy now, pay later (BNPL) sector with “BNPL fintechs increasingly using Visa virtual cards to settle with merchants, driving triple-digit payments volume growth year-over-year in the United States,” Visa CEO Alfred Kelly said during the call.

“BNPL fintech consumers also continue to use their cards to pay off their instalments with active cards growing 50% in the same period.”

The launch of the Visa Installments payment service in Canada that enables consumers to choose to pay for purchases in instalments over a specific period of time now has “commitments from issuers and acquirers representing the majority of payments volume”.

Visa Core Products visa contactless

Visa’s growth has been driven by the strength of our core products — credit, debit and prepaid products.
Credit: Credit cards and digital credentials allow consumers and businesses to access credit to pay for goods and services. Credit cards are affiliated with programs operated by financial institution clients, co-brand partners, fintechs and affinity partners.
Debit: Debit cards and digital credentials allow consumers and small businesses to purchase goods and services using funds held in their bank accounts. Debit cards enable account holders to transact in person, online or via mobile without needing cash or checks and without accessing a line of credit. The Visa/PLUS Global ATM network also provides debit, credit and prepaid account holders with cash access, and other banking capabilities, in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide through issuing and acquiring partnerships with both financial institutions and independent ATM operators.
Prepaid: Prepaid cards and digital credentials draw from a designated balance funded by individuals, businesses or governments. Prepaid cards address many use cases and needs, including general purpose reloadable, payroll, government and corporate disbursements, healthcare, gift and travel. Visa-branded prepaid cards also play an important part in financial inclusion, bringing payment solutions to those with limited or no access to traditional banking products.

Capabilities

Visa offers capabilities, tools, and solutions that enable consumer payments and help clients grow as digital commerce, new technologies, and new participants continue to transform the payments ecosystem. Some of the company offerings include:

Tap to Pay visa contactless

As the company seeks to improve the user experience in the face-to-face environment, contactless payments or tap to pay, which is tapping a contactless card or mobile device on a terminal to make a payment, has emerged as a preferred way to pay among consumers in many countries around the world. Tap to pay adoption is growing and many consumers have come to expect touchless payment experiences. In addition, Visa continues to work with payments industry partners and governments to support raising contactless payment limits.
Globally Visa has more than 20 countries with more than 90 percent contactless penetration and nearly 70 countries where tap-to-pay is more than 50 percent of face-to-face transactions. Excluding the United States, nearly 70 percent of face-to-face transactions globally were contactless. In the U.S., Visa has more than 15 percent contactless penetration. Visa has 400 million tap-to-pay-enabled Visa cards, and now three cities have above 25 percent face-to-face tap-to-pay penetration: New York, San Francisco and San Jose.

Visa has activated nearly 500 contactless public transport projects worldwide and have nearly 750 projects in their pipeline.

Tokenization

Visa Token Service (VTS) brings trust to digital commerce innovation. As consumers increasingly rely on digital transactions, VTS is designed to enhance the digital ecosystem through improved authorization, reduced fraud and improved customer experience. VTS helps protect digital transactions by replacing 16-digit Visa account numbers with a token protecting the underlying account information. This security technology can work for a variety of payment transactions, both in the physical and online space.
The issuance of network tokens continues to accelerate. In the past 17 months, Visa has more than doubled the number of network tokens issued from one billion to 2.6 billion. By comparison, it took nearly six years to reach their first one billion network tokens.

Crypto capabilities visa contactless

Visa will also “continue to lean into the crypto space” and “innovate around our settlement and crypto AP capabilities”, including the development of central bank digital currency (CBDC) capabilities, Kelly said.

“Earlier this month, we previewed CBDC payment APIs currently in development, which would enable central banks to connect their Ethereum-based CBDCs with Visa rails through a wallet with digital issuance capabilities, enabling consumers to spend with CBDCs at any Visa merchant.

“We partnered with Consensys to develop this concept, which was selected as one of the winning entries out of 300 ideas from 50 countries at the Global CBDC Challenge, as part of the Singapore FinTech Festival judged by representatives from the IMF, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements and the central banks of Brazil, India, Kenya, and Indonesia.”

Click to Pay

Click to Pay provides a simplified and more consistent cardholder checkout experience online by removing time-consuming key entry of personal information and enabling consumer and transaction data to be passed securely between payments network participants. Based on the EMV® Secure Remote Commerce industry standard, Click to Pay brings a standardized and streamlined approach to online checkout and meets the needs of consumers shopping across a growing number of connected devices. The goal of Click to Pay is to make digital payments safe, consistent, and interoperable like the checkout experience in physical stores.

New Flows

New flows represent a $185 trillion(3) volume opportunity. Visa’s network of networks approach creates opportunities to capture new sources of money movement through card and non-card flows for consumers, businesses and governments around the world by facilitating P2P, B2C, B2B, B2b and G2C payments.

Visa Direct

Visa Direct is Visa’s global, real-time push payments platform, which reverses the traditional card payment flow by allowing payment originators, through their acquirer, to push funds directly to eligible debit and prepaid cards or accounts. It helps facilitate fast, simple and secure money movement around the world, enabling businesses and consumers to send money directly to a bank account or card, including domestic or cross-border payouts and payments, P2P, payments to small businesses, and corporate, worker, insurance and government payouts.

Mastercard reported that one in two in-person card transactions it processed worldwide during Q4 2021 were contactless during its earnings call last month.