Visa is allowing third-party partners to offer its Visa Token Service (VTS) platform, allowing device manufacturers, issuers, internet of things developers, wallet providers, merchants and others to offer its digital payment service on any device.

A new certification programme centred around Visa Ready will offer token requesters who want access to Visa tokens the ability to go to different providers already integrated with VTS.

The payments giant envisages various use cases including device manufacturers looking to add payment capabilities into NFC fitness wristbands or internet of things devices in the home.

“It expands the market to other companies to develop new, secure digital payment services and ensures consistency envisioned in the EMVCo token standards,” Visa says.

“There are billions of devices that we think will be commerce-enabled out there in the future,” Visa’s Vish Shastry explained to NFC World.

“We’ve been working really closely with Apple, Google, Samsung — all of the big mobile and ecommerce enablement platforms. These are all platforms that span hundreds of millions of consumers globally and what we’ve been hearing from the market is ‘hey, Visa, we’d love to have you guys be able to take tokens out to a much broader range of folks in the ecosystem.”

Empowering the ecosystem

“We’re announcing a new certification programme centred around Visa Ready that will ensure that, as token requesters come out of the ecosystem and they want to get access to Visa Tokens, they can go to different providers in the ecosystem that are already integrated with Visa Token Service,” Shastry adds.

“These have gone through our security evaluation, they’ve gone through our solution approval process that are already integrated with VTS and these providers in turn can go and work with these individual token requesters.

“We really do want to enable these smaller providers and so by empowering these other third party token requester providers in the ecosystem, they can go and work with these smaller token requesters.

“There’s a whole bunch of new players, new use cases which we’re really, really interested in and eager to see and secure those billions and billions of devices, that’s the main thing. We want to make sure that tokenization is integrated as broadly as possible so that consumers know that they can enable commerce and payments safely out of all these devices.”

Visa launched VTS in September 2014 to enable card account numbers to be replaced with digital tokens. More than 2,300 financial institutions and banking partners signed up for the tokenization service in less than a year.

It extended the platform to auto manufacturers to enable in-vehicle payment experiences through Visa Checkout in February.

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