By Ansar Ansari
For consumers, the days of pulling out a card from a physical wallet are quickly becoming old school—and for good reason. They have options like Visa Checkout that require only a username and password to pay and mobile payment services like Google’s Android Pay that let you pay with your phone.
Today, Visa will help to give consumers even more choice in how they want to pay by opening its Visa Checkout platform to issuers, payment app providers and digital wallets that want to offer an easy and secure checkout service for customers on the go. Google’s Android Pay will take advantage of this new open platform by offering Visa Checkout to their consumers for online purchases.
Open access to Visa Checkout allows issuers and digital wallet providers to easily integrate Visa Checkout, which offers consumers a simpler, more secure way to make online and in-app purchases. Merchants who have already integrated, or plan to integrate, Visa Checkout will have access to more digital wallets, such as Android Pay, giving them the ability to offer new online and in-app payment services to the potentially millions of consumers who already use digital wallets on the web. In doing so, consumers can choose their favorite way to pay easily and securely online.
Here’s how it works: An online shopper who has linked their Android Pay digital wallet to Visa Checkout would simply click the Visa Checkout button on a merchant’s checkout page and select their existing Android Pay device authentication method, like a fingerprint, to complete a purchase.
Behind the scenes, security keeps confidential information undercover. Merchants who integrate Visa Checkout’s open platform will also have access to the 3-D Secure 2.0 specification and EMVCo Token Service (VTS) standard. These security standards can add additional layers of protection for the consumer.
Rest assured, as connected devices become the preferred way to pay, Visa Checkout and its partners will continue to evolve as the needs of consumers help drive new ways to pay.
