I wonder how many fintech players understand just how big a deal Visa’s recent announcements were? Here’s a benchmark: Tom Noyes’ blog is a must-read for those of us who are fascinated by payments and in his new post about Visa Flex, he gets to the heart of the matter: “using a credential instead of a PAN creates a many-to-one relationship and acts much more as an ‘identity’ than an instrument”. Identity is indeed the new… well, you know.
A few years ago I remember talking about digital wallets at a
xxx
A Visa study found that more than half of card users want the power to access multiple accounts through a single credential.1 The Visa Flexible Credential will allow a single card product to toggle between payment methods, putting the power of choice in the hands of the consumer.
Now people can easily set parameters or choose whether they use debit, credit, “pay-in-four” with Buy Now Pay Later or even pay using rewards points. Visa Flexible Credential is live in Asia and will be launching with Affirm later this summer in the US.From: Visa reinvents the card: New suite of digital products.
xxx
This doesn’t come out of nowhere: Visa is smart. It’s now about 15 years since I worked on a Visa project (which in those days was called Non-Payment Authentication, or NPA) to experiment with using a Visa card as a credential and I don’t doubt that there have been many other experiments since then.
Now, of course, some people might argue that using some other token (eg, an EU Digital ID) instead of a Visa card might bring more competition into the payment space, since it could allow customers to choose payment mechanisms that bypass banks (ie, Visa’s customers) and bank networks completely (eg, stablecoins) but there’s no denying that Visa have seized the commanding heights.
In reality, the battle for the consumer’s identity is only just beginning. In addition to what’s going on here with credentials, keep an eye on what is bubbling under with request-to-pay (R2P) and variable-recurring-payments (VRP) because I expect we’ll see more innovation here before the year is out.
Snippings 