Visa Seeks To Foster Virtual Currency Commerce With Its Developer Platform

Visa, a leading global payments technology company, is working to enable consumers, businesses, banks and governments to use digital currency. With Visa Developer platform, the company seeks to accelerate the creation of innovative payment solutions and the migration to digital commerce.

The Microtransactions (MTX) APIs are now available on Visa Developers website for experimenting and creating test applications. The MTX platform is a secure, scalable, and efficient Software as a Service (SaaS)-based platform that offers a full suite of monetization solutions for online and mobile applications.

The company explains that microtransactions occur when users purchase goods using virtual currencies or points (game points, customer loyalty points, and digital coupons) that have been granted to them by the applications they use on a regular basis.

“App-based virtual coins, points, and tokens that can be used to fulfill microtransactions are experiencing rapid growth, thanks to the proliferation of mobile and social network games and applications”, according to the website.

MTX offers a set of APIs that let developers create payment solutions using points, promotional rewards, or virtual currency and coupons.  It provides access to in-app microtransactions on top of a highly-scalable hosted environment for application developers to offload the burden of heavy transactions.

“The MTX platform gives developers a set of simple and easy-to-integrate Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to leverage the monetization services in omni-channel applications”, it added.

Coinfox reported that that the APIs are available for working in a sandbox and subject to further approval for implementing them in commercial applications.

This Visa developer platform has already gone through several iterations of beta testing, The Merkle reported. The partners including Scotiabank, US Bank, Capital One and others have helped Visa gain insights as to “how the API’s and sandbox can be used, and where future improvements will need to be made.”