Visa Direct Continues its Expansion Through Key Partnerships

Visa  announced that Visa Direct continues to gain momentum as a faster payments solution through key partnerships with FIS and Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. (NASDAQ: JKHY) for person-to-person (P2P) payments, and Stripe, Hyperwallet and Ingo Money for faster business and government disbursements.

Visa Direct is a card-based platform that can deliver funds in real-time1 to more than 200 million Visa debit cards in the United States, as well as non-Visa branded debit cards, for ubiquitous reach to any consumer or small business with a debit card. Funds are transferred into the customer’s bank account without the need for complicated checking account and routing numbers.

“Visa Direct has experienced incredible growth in the US in 2016,” said Bill Sheley, head of global push payments, Visa Inc. “In the personal payments and business disbursements space, where cash and checks still prevail, it is very exciting to join forces with our partners to help digitize these services for faster and more secure payments. In today’s new economy, we look forward to helping businesses and consumers send and receive funds in a more efficient and effective way.”

FIS, a global leader in financial technology, has integrated Visa Direct into People Pay, its P2P payments service for financial institutions. Offered as a white-label solution, banks can use their existing integration with FIS to easily leverage the card-based feature for their customers in online and mobile banking. Jack Henry & Associates, a leading provider of integrated technology solutions and payment processing services for financial institutions, has partnered with Visa to deliver faster P2P payments to a recipient’s Visa debit card. The integration of JHA Payment Solutions™ with Visa Direct will enable recipients to receive funds on the same day or one day sooner based on the institution’s funding model.

Visa Direct is also making business disbursements to consumers and businesses faster and easier. Stripe’s new Instant Payouts feature, which allows drivers, couriers and other sellers in online marketplaces to get paid immediately, is leveraging Visa Direct. Many marketplaces are already using Stripe’s service including Lyft, Care.com and goPanache, among others.

Hyperwallet, a leading global payouts provider to digital marketplaces, has also integrated Visa Direct into its existing payout methods. Through Hyperwallet’s JavaScript Widget, developers will be able to quickly plug into its platform and offer real time payout capabilities within their native application, with minimal coding required. This will ultimately help Hyperwallet’s clients to more easily and securely pay their distributed workforce, while reducing costs and improving the timeliness of their payments.

“Faster payments are now the center of attention in the payments industry and rapidly becoming the new norm among consumers and businesses,” said Tim Sloane, vice president, payments innovation, Mercator Advisory Group. “Visa Direct is the right product at the right time because it enables faster payments in the market segments that are growing the fastest, including P2P and Mass Payments, and utilizes the API form factor that enables broader consumption by solution providers combined with faster operational deployment.”

In addition, Ingo Money, a leader in real-time push payments technology, will leverage Visa Direct to power its faster payments solution, Ingo® Instant Payments. The solution is an API-based, turnkey push payments platform and gateway that provides merchants, businesses, governments and financial institutions with an easy to integrate, low-cost solution to disburse funds to consumers, service providers, employees and more. Through this collaboration, Visa and Ingo Money will bring to market a solution that greatly reduces the friction of implementing real-time funds disbursements.