Faster, seamless payments improve sales and give consumers a superior shopping or purchase experience. Globally, Visa, with its vast array of products, empowers financial institutions, merchants, and rising fintechs alike to make payments seamless and convenient for their customers. Now Visa is partnering with Hatch to connect with Sri Lanka’s fintech startups and support them on their collective mission to make digital payments frictionless. This partnership will see a series of webinars conducted on the 6th, 9th, and 15th of September 2022 as part of the Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka. Open to all fintech entrepreneurs, these webinars will cover various topics to showcase how they can supercharge their products with Visa products, services and expertise.
What to expect from the Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka
These webinars are open to all Sri Lanka’s fintech startups. Through this initiative, Visa aims to work alongside Hatch to raise awareness of how its products can support these companies in building something new or augmenting their existing solutions. Speaking to Arteculate, Head of Products & Solutions at Visa India and South Asia, Ramakrishnan Gopalan elaborated, “Fintechs can leverage our capabilities to build cutting-edge payment solutions. For instance, Visa Direct can be used to enable near real-time payments* between Visa cardholders.”
The upcoming webinars will feature experts from Visa who will dive deep into the company’s products and showcase how they can facilitate such collaborations. Registration for these webinars is now open, and you can participate by clicking here. Below is a list of the topics that’ll be featured across the series.
A glimpse into Visa’s global innovation tour
Across the globe, Visa has several innovation centers, which serve as spaces where it works with its partners to build new experiences. The webinar will showcase best-in-class payment experiences through a series of experiential demos and will look at trends driving the future of commerce and how Visa’s network capabilities can help move our client’s and partner’s business forward. Throughout the tour, fintechs can understand how Visa’s capabilities are supporting the needs of consumers, businesses, and governments.
eCommerce solutions to empower merchants
Visa has a wide range of payment solutions for eCommerce merchants through its subsidiary, Cybersource. These webinars will introduce Cybersource’s capabilities and dive deep into its suite of solutions. With the solutions it offers, Sri Lanka’s eCommerce merchants would gain several options to process local and international payments while offering a seamless experience to consumers. Further, Cybersource also has payment solutions for physical payments, such as QR code payments. Due to the lockdowns owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world saw a boom in cashless payments and online shopping. Products like those offered by Cybersource offer a pathway for eCommerce merchants to capitalize on this opportunity to catapult their growth.
Opening the doors to adopting BNPL
A trending phenomenon in fintech is the concept of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), where consumers can split their purchases into convenient deferred payment options. This offers several benefits for all stakeholders, where merchants benefit from higher value sales, and customers enjoy greater flexibility in splitting their purchases. Being the global leader in digital payments, Visa can enable fintech partners to implement BNPL into their solutions rapidly. Some notable Indian fintech startups which have partnered with Visa for its BNPL solutions are Slice and LazyPay.
Visa Direct: Enabling seamless near real-time payments
Another capability that Visa can offer to fintechs, and you can learn about at these webinars is Visa Direct, a near real-time payments network for businesses and person-to-person (P2P) payments. Since its launch, it has helped institutions and fintechs alike to allow their customers to transfer funds to and from their debit accounts easily. Today, Visa Direct supports several fintech use cases such as P2P payments, settling credit card bills, loading digital wallets using debit cards, or any other form of push payment. Thus, Visa Direct serves as a bridge between a consumer’s debit accounts and the digital economy.
Visa’s Value Added Services to support fintechs
Being a global leader in payments, Visa also offers several services for partners to leverage its data and expertise in digital payments. These services help companies prevent fraud while also improving their operational efficiency. A notable example of Visa’s risk management capabilities is its solutions that allow merchants, issuers, and fintechs to set clear fraud detection rules – such as detecting unusual patterns and restricting card activity or flagging them for issuers to act upon in real time.
The beginning of Visa’s journey with Sri Lanka’s fintechs
As a global leader in digital payments, Visa has a wealth of experience with fintech solutions in similar markets across Asia, such as India, Bangladesh, and the rest of South Asia. “We have worked with several fintech use cases across the world and helped scale them up. We’re eager to share our experience to support Sri Lanka’s fintech startups to help them grow their business,” expressed Gopalan. Hence, Visa aims to work with partners like Hatch to dialogue with Sri Lanka’s fintechs and find synergies for collaboration and their growth.
In addition, Visa will provide mentoring and support to these companies to apply for its partner programs. Chief among them is the Visa Fintech Fast Track program, Visa Ready, and the Visa Accelerator Program. While such programs will support fintech startups in different ways, the common thread is the support from Visa to help them overcome barriers and attain scale. In closing, Gopalan shared, “Visa has always been committed to helping the payments ecosystem grow and in Sri Lanka, fintechs make up an important part of that growth. We believe Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka is one of many steps Visa will take towards working closely with fintechs, enabling their growth and accelerating the digitization of payments in Sri Lanka.”
*1: Actual fund availability varies by financial institution. Visa requires some issuers in some countries to make funds available to its cardholders within a maximum of 30 minutes of approving the transaction.