iSignthis Ltd (ASX: ISX|FRA: TA8) (“The Company”) is pleased to announce that it has entered into an Australian Principal Member licensing agreement with the Asia Pacific Singapore based regional subsidiary of Visa Inc (NYSE: V).

The agreement allows the Company to act as a merchant’s card acquiring institution, and process card not present (online/remote) payments and make settlements on behalf of the merchant from cards issued anywhere globally by other Visa Principal or Associate member institutions. The Company generates revenue from its contracted merchants by charging a percentage fee known as the Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on the sale amount processed on behalf of the merchant.

The overall value of the card processing market in Australia was $748,110,632,702 in 20171 across all card schemes, with the majority of that value being in retail point of sale as card present transactions. Visa is a global payments technology company that enables fast, secure and reliable electronic payments, with more than 3.3Bn cards worldwide across 200 countries and territories, and capacity to process more than 65,000 transaction messages per second.

Visa’s mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, reliable and secure digital payment network that enables individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. In addition to the card issuance and acceptance network, Visa has developed a number of innovations to support new ways to pay.

Principal membership of major card schemes is a complex process, with the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) regulating card payments2 and access by institutions3 to the major card schemes, including Visa.

Each card scheme must then be licensed individually, which in this case included Visa’s assessment criteria4 requiring the Company to demonstrate the following:

• Fraud and security controls.
• Corporate and ethics governance.
• Sound business practices.
• (Relevant) Business strategy.
• Business continuity.
• Information consistency and security.
• Information conciliation.
• Services availability

The Company is also a Principal Member of Mastercard, ChinaUnionPay, Diners and Discover in Australia, with similar memberships in the European Economic Area (EEA). The Company has commenced its Australian Tier 1 interconnect build out to Visa, Mastercard, Diners and Discover, and has built, owns and operates its own card processing network in the EEA.

John Karantzis, CEO of iSignthis said, “The Company is pleased to extend its principal member relationship with Visa into multiple regions, including the EEA and Australia. This agreement also paves the way for iSignthis to expand within the Asia Pacific region in due course, through its relationship with the Visa Singapore regional office.”