Visa Upgrades Global Payment Network, Keeping Pace With Growing Member and Cardholder Demand

SAN FRANCISCO – Visa is making it easier for cardholders to get their rewards for using select Visa cards, and for Members and merchants to offer advanced payment services to cardholders, as part of Visa’s semi-annual software update to VisaNet, the world’s largest payment network that processes an average of 100 million transactions each day.

The software release contained 1.2 million code changes that were implemented in all four Visa data centers around the world over a 24-hour period beginning on April 1, while Visa’s payment system continued to process transactions at an average rate of 3500 transaction messages a second. The upgrade contains significant enhancements to VisaNet, making it easier for Visa and card issuers to track purchases that qualify for rewards, broadening Visa’s ability to track and process chip and contactless transactions, simplifying the activation and loading of prepaid Visa products, and streamlining the charge-dispute process.

Visa has a long history of adding new services and enhancing existing services and payment products to VisaNet every six months, and has streamlined the process of constant improvement to provide member financial institutions and other payment providers with a predictable timetable for making necessary changes in their systems.

Over the past two years, however, these semi-annual changes have grown significantly as Visa has been able to rapidly develop and deploy new payment services to meet the ever growing demand for electronic payments, and support the widespread use of new types of payment cards and technologies. This April’s Business Release is even more complex than last October’s, which set a record for the number of changes made to the VisaNet system.

“We continually invest in technology because it is the heartbeat behind Visa’s brand promise,” said John Partridge, CEO of Inovant LLC, Visa’s IT organization responsible for global transactions processing and technology development. “Even as we’re making these changes, our staff is already planning the next upgrade to ensure we are staying ahead of the demand curve for electronic payments.”

For this round, Visa has invested more than $29 million related to 33 discrete projects, involving nearly 200,000 person-hours of work by programmers, testers, analysts, designers and managers who spent the last nine months preparing for the release.

Among the most significant changes for cardholders, the revised VisaNet system will:

• Provide greater cardholder access to and more choices of card rewards programs whose popularity is mushrooming with cardholders and issuers alike.
• Simplify activation and load functionality of pre-paid cards, a partial purchase with a pre-paid card with insufficient funds, and enhancements to pre-paid Interlink transactions.
• Improve Visa’s ability to track and distinguish contactless payments from traditional magnetic stripe payments to support the recently launched contactless payments platform in the United States.
• Include a new version of Visa Resolve Online, to strengthen the process of resolving disputed transactions among cardholders, merchants and financial institutions that eliminates the need for physical document exchange between card issuers and merchant processors for dispute resolution. The new version expands functionality to include more transaction types, more reports, and enhanced operational efficiency that will simplify and reduce the time needed to resolve cardholder disputes.
• Upgrade VisaNet’s ability to handle the next generation of “smart cards” with embedded chips. Those cards are primarily used in regions outside the United States. The enhancements will provide financial institutions with options regarding the format they use to send or receive Visa Smart Debit and Visa Smart Credit (VSDC) Cards, and will support two new encryption technologies.

“We don’t know of any other network of this size and complexity that can be upgraded this way without being taken offline for hours or even days,” Partridge said. “It’s a testament to the work Visa has done over the past 30 years in creating a system that is this reliable, yet can keep pace with the growing demands for new payment products and services.”

Visa will maintain an active command center in California to monitor the system updates and resolve any problems as soon as they appear, ensuring the changes have minimal effect on the processing of Visa transactions.