Visa Debuts New Mobile Payments And NFC Partner Program For Merchants And Developers, Ready
Credit card company Visa is ramping up its partner program to help integrate its payments technologies in mobile devices and platforms. The new initiative, called the Visa Ready Partner Program …
Context & Ripple Effects
Visa had already paired merchant incentives and penalties with infrastructure plans to move mobile payments forward in 2011, including its push to steer merchants toward mobile-payment acceptance. Its investment in mobile-payments startup Square also placed it alongside a newer card-acceptance model.
The Visa Ready program shifts part of that effort to the integration layer: device makers, platform providers, developers and merchants have a formal path for incorporating Visa mobile and NFC payment technology.
First-order effects
- Merchants and developers gain a Visa-backed partner channel for integrating mobile and NFC payments, reducing the need to navigate implementation independently.
- Visa gains a mechanism to extend its payment technology into participating devices and platforms rather than relying solely on merchant adoption incentives.
Second-order effects
- Mobile-payment providers and device partners face greater pressure to support Visa-compatible NFC implementations if they want access to Visa's merchant and cardholder network.
- Visa's earlier merchant-adoption push becomes more actionable for merchants as more certified integrations can connect acceptance infrastructure with consumer devices.
Third-order effects
- If card networks increasingly compete through integration programs, control over mobile payments will depend not only on acceptance terminals but also on which platforms and developers can most easily embed network credentials and rules.
The trend: Card networks are moving from funding and incentivizing mobile acceptance toward organizing the device, software and merchant partners needed to make NFC payments interoperable.