Partner collaboration continues to give businesses a leg up on the competition in a competitive economy. And, today, Visa, Inc. held its “Design. Build. Deliver.” event in San Francisco to announce a new way of collaborating with its partners to push further into the Internet of Things market.

Building an open platform

Recognizing that commerce has changed from an instore experience to a connective experience, Visa Chief Executive Officer Charles W. Scharf talks about his journey to be part of the change of how people interact before, during and after the entire buying experience. “Payments need to be safe and secure to facilitate the experience, but payments are now so much more,” he said. “It can both influence the buying decisions and make the experience more complete than ever before.”

Visa and its partners could very well be in a great position to lead the way in the transformation from the traditional hardware-based network of the past to a new a software-based solution. Scharf announced the launch of a Visa developer platform as a milestone that marks this transformation of the company’s global network to an open platform. “Developers at financial institution merchants and technology companies big and small can now access our payment capabilities and integrate them into the new digital commerce experiences they are creating,” he said.

Visa Developer open for business

Visa is obviously learning from the open-source technical community that collaboration is the key to growth. Scharf punctuated this by saying Visa Developer will bring together skills, creativity and ingenuity of countless developers who will develop the next generation of commerce experiences.

Scharf sees two goals ahead: displacing cash and driving economic growth. The opportunities in the commerce space are limitless, and Visa is banking on the open platform to accelerate its growth.

Continuing to pioneer electronic payments

Since 1958, Visa has been operating at a scale with security, reliability and performance that it continues to innovate. According to Rajat Taneja, vice president of technology for Visa, the company is able to connect 100 billion transactions over $7 trillion per year. He said for several years the company has been on a journey to provide developers big and small with direct access to individual Visa services. Historically, updates and improvements have been packaged as products and released throughout the year. Taneja said that the open platform will give partner developers direct access to individual services and allow them to dream, develop and design.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving Visa to discover new ways to converge over 50 billion connected devices with commerce. Developers working on these devices will now be backed by the scale, security and support of the Visa network.

The platform is an http-based restful interface with interoperable APIs. There will also be sandbox testing to build apps and a developer toolkit that will include code snippets. The main goal is to accelerate the deployment of Visa services and innovate in the process.

For more information about the program, visit http://www.visa.com/developer.

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