Enabling right approaches with Visa power

The payment landscape is fast-evolving and the lines dividing the physical and the digital world is blurred. The possibilities of growth for a brand in this landscape is endless and every brand wants to conquer and rule its domain with power by being able to keep its processes agile and payment in this landscape plays a very important role. In conversation with Dr. Saeeda Jaffar, GM GCC, Visa to understand how the brand is changing the way retailers eye payments and how it is shaping the landscape in general with agility.

Keeping it ready
“Today customer wants to shop from anywhere, anytime, and does not want to be restricted by the boundaries or layers of physical or digital platforms. They seek convenience across domains and categories and thus, want to be very fluid in their approaches toward brands. That is where a partner like Visa comes into play and we have strengthened our capabilities to help assist the entire retail ecosystem, through thick and thin. Gone are the days when there were just two broad payment options. Today there is BNPL, there are wallets and the ecosystem is constantly evolving. So, our task is to make the customer choose any of these payment options of their preference in real-time to be able to smoothly shop and checkout, from wherever,” Dr. Saeeda explains when talking about how Visa is creating that best-in-class payment support for brands.

She also adds that Visa offers one of the most secure payment gateways in the world, which allows any customer to shop in their comfort using any tool of their preference, without having to worry about fraud and thefts.

Security first
For Visa, security is not an option but one of the most primal things, “we take security very seriously and spend a lot of money and time on securing our processes to a T so that our customers and partners never face an issue when it comes to payment gateways. Not only that, we also harness the power of Big Data and have a very strong and sophisticated AI-predictive engine working in the background, which we use to study the risk associated with each transaction, in advance. For every transaction, we use more than 500 parameters to measure its viability and risks. All that happens through AI within seconds and in real-time,” Dr. Saeeda points out to elaborate on the exceptional approach that Visa takes to make it 100% accurate.

Visa responsibly processed more than 250 billion transactions last year. These secured transaction volumes in itself demonstrate the power of visa and how it leverages data to make it smooth and error-free for the entire ecosystem.

Spreading awareness
Visa not only empowers the stakeholders to serve their customers with ease but also educates them and helps spread awareness about security and safety. Every year Visa releases educational content to spread the right word about best practices and to make the entire ecosystem more aware and prepared. Offering that safety net for payments makes them exceptional in their approach as compared to others.

“Payments are evolving and the future of payments presents us with two varying avenues. One avenue is more the invisible path, which is conventional and stitches payments as part of the retail journey in a very silent way. Here, across the customer journeys payments do not evidently come up as a notable factor, but gets weaved in the process of retail silently. On the other hand, there are experiential payment methods. This is where the customer can experience payment channels in a very innovative way. With the development of interactional commerce, these methods are also maturing to lend a creative angle to customer journeys. For instance, during the FIFA world cup we brought in the face recognition payment gateways, which helped customers save a lot of time and shop what they want in a jiffy just by getting their face recognized at the payment gateway,” Dr. Saeeda elaborates on the future of payments.

The landscape of opportunity for payments is immense and Visa is treading on this futuristic path by belting in innovation and studying the demands of customer behaviour changes.