Visa's New Developer Platform 'Visa Next' Offers Open APIs

Visa launched a new platform for developers in the payments industry on Monday. Called Visa Next, it includes a set of open APIs in beta, with a suite of tools and documentation. It's designed to allow third-party applications to create their own digital Visa cards and build and manage new services for Visa cards.

A press release provided a list of actions that Visa Next APIs can perform. These actions range from making new digital card accounts on demand and tokenizing accounts for ecommerce and mobile wallets, to configuring rules around digital card use and card sharing.

Diagram illustrating the Visa Open Platform

You can find sample code on the Visa Next API Reference site in cURL, Ruby, Python, Node.js, and Java. Beta participation is currently invite-only, but the Quickstart guide gives a decent preview of the platform. It provides a RESTful API infrastructure and a sandbox environment for testing.

The company expects many early use cases to come from Asia, where mobile wallets have already seen wide adoption. "Many consumers in Asia, for example, use a super-app wallet that is only accepted within their country borders, but not necessarily elsewhere," Visa said in a statement. "With the new set of capabilities, Visa’s clients and partners can give their customers an option to turn their wallet balance into a digital Visa card ... and begin transacting in over 200+ countries and territories."

Cloud-based payment products and services like Stripe have burst onto the scene in recent years. "There are a lot of things on the issuing and consumer side that are going to require the network to do things differently — and for our network to do things differently — if we want to serve it well," Visa's SVP of global issuer and consumer solutions Sam Shrauger told PYMNTS. Visa Next is the latest example of the payment industry's movement toward open APIs.