
However, for others such as B2B customers, it is less vital and so “can happen at the end of the day”. Speed, for example, is far more important for some customers, particularly those making P2P transfers, for whom “the transaction needs to land in minutes or seconds”. “In order to provide the best user experience, you need to rely on data,” he says, pointing to the variation in needs that the company sees from this data. This means the company is servicing very different needs for different users, which Salazar highlights is handled through access to consistent, detailed data – vital when the company has around 550 different enablers including acquirers, processors, banks and fintechs.

In many ways, the user experience is highly correlated to the quality of the network.” Varying use cases: From Remittances to B2BĬentral to Visa Direct’s offering, however, is the fact that it does not focus on one aspect of money transfers, such as remittances, but instead covers a wide range of use cases, from consumer P2P payments to B2B transfers. “That gives us the confidence that the network is providing a better user experience at our end, in the case of Visa Direct. “In most cases, it happens in a matter of seconds or minutes, but the maximum that they have to apply this is 30 minutes. It comes with data, it comes with reporting, it comes with SLAs, it comes with a program,” says Salazar, adding that this particularly applies to its near real-time transaction processing. “That's why Visa is in a better position to provide a better user experience. Visa Direct is combatting this by mandating standards across its network in a similar way to those in its payment network. However, he highlights the fragmented nature of the ecosystem as a challenge, arguing that “there is not a single business case or a single economic model”, which he says results in a lack of a unified user experience. “We want to apply the same logic to a money movement transaction.” “ payments are becoming almost invisible, but there are 500 instructions that happen when you swipe or tap in any payment situation,” he says.

Visa Direct: Taking on a fragmented ecosystemĪ core focus of Visa Direct, says Salazar, is to bring the card payments experience to the money transfers space.
