Edson Perin
The Visa credit card company announced that it has reached 1 billion NFC (Near Field Communication) tokens distributed to more than 8,200 service issuers in 150 markets around the world. Of the total 1 billion, more than 680 million have been issued in the past 12 months, according to Ansar Ansari, senior vice president of digital payment products at Visa.
“The great shift from the world to digital underscores the need for easy and secure digital commerce, which is why we have seen such a huge increase in the number of tokens issued by Visa Token Service,” he said. According to a Visa survey, 83% of consumers surveyed say they will make purchases using non-contact devices because they consider it an effective way to improve their shopping experiences.
The company, one of the major players in the plastic card payment segment, a system that has helped to gradually replace the use of paper money, has dedicated itself over the years to making this process more practical and secure. Now, although Visa’s core business has not changed significantly, contactless payments technology is taking up more and more space in its business, whether by plastic cards or via smartphones – both with NFC chips.
Contactless payments have been developing very fast in several economies around the world, thanks to the work of Visa and companies that compete with it in the same segment. There are even solutions such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, which use smartphones on iOS and Android platforms respectively to offer a contactless payment interface to their users, although in both cases they use the services of credit card operators. .
In order to follow the trail of contactless payments, which are guaranteed to attract consumers especially in the post-pandemic world of Covid-19, Visa has also expanded the breadth of its systems to a variety of services and devices, including smart watches watches). For this, the company created the platform called Visa Token Service (VTS).
Visa IoT and the company’s focus
VTS acts as a unified platform to support contactless payments around the world. Through this system, credit card numbers become “tokens”, whose main purpose is to reduce fraud. This principle has already been used by mobile devices, such as smartphones and smartwatches. The concept embedded in this strategy is the Internet of Things (or IoT, from the English, Internet of Things).
In IoT, Visa focuses on six main categories of services, such as “wearable” devices, where smartwatches are found; connected cars; large appliances, such as refrigerators; retail; smart cities; and corporate environments. These categories aim to allow fuel and parking payments directly by vehicles, payments for watches or other personal use accessories, and even make a refrigerator do grocery shopping.
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