Payment processing vendor Visa is known and accepted far and wide Their cards are featured as debit and credit cards for a very large number of banks and creditors, mostly in the United States. Some of their partners, such as Wells Fargo, have gone on to partner with tech firms as the mobile payment revolution rolls on. In addition to more traditional plastic, Visa are no strangers to the mobile payment space themselves. After trotting out a good number of APIs and development initiatives, as well as partnering with most everybody in the mobile payment space either directly or indirectly, it seems that Visa is finally consolidating their APIs and development resources into a single community-driven initiative.
The new initiative is dubbed Visa Developer and is intended to eventually feature just about every mobile payment and P2P API that Visa has thus far created or had created for them, all there for developers to use, fork and experiment with. According to the official announcement, the new Visa Developer portal boasts “documents, sample code, reference Apps, community interactions, announcements, customer support, and blogs from thought leaders.”, which Visa is confident is a consummate list of “Everything you need to start building your payment applications and solutions.” The new community will also house test data, analytics, sandboxes and logging of projects, allowing easy experimentation, innovation and collaboration.
The first release of the Visa Developer suite includes nifty features like a single login for developers on all APIs, a sandbox to test new developments in and a few core APIs for Visa’s services, which they plan to grow over time. As well as more APIs, Visa plans to add in more reference code and apps, add end-to-end testing in their sandbox environments, tools to ease the switch from sandbox to prototype, developer forums and a marketplace where developers can strut out their newest creations. They state that their mission here is to “displace cash and bring the security, convenience, and global reach of digital commerce to consumers, banks, merchants, businesses and governments everywhere.” If you’re a developer, involved in the transaction industry or just plain curious, hit up the source link for the full release and instructions to access the portal.