Visa Aims to Standardize Digital Checkout

When consumers purchase goods online, they experience the myriad of ways in which a merchant accepts their payments. In today’s digital buying arena, there is a lack of any standard method to collect online payments and this leads to frustration for the shopper who wants one simple and consistent way to pay at any of the websites they visit.

But that is a tall order to fulfill when consumers use a large variety of devices and digital wallets to make purchases. And they aren’t the only ones who are frustrated with the current state of online checkout. For merchants, manpower and expense is required for the multiple integrations to support so many payment options.

Simpler Digital Commerce Experience

That’s why Visa is launching its Visa Digital Commerce Program in an effort to simplify the digital payment experience and create a consistent, compatible standard.

This program leverages EMVCo’s Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) framework that eliminates the need for passwords while streamlining and standardizing the end-to-end digital payment process. The flow will happen across browsers and devices including current and emerging ones in the future. Visa’s goal is to improve the payment acceptance standard, as well as, make sure the experience for consumers is consistent across all shopping endeavors.

Just Click “Pay” or “Buy”

Visa’s new program will allow merchants to offer a quick and intuitive experience during the checkout process by allowing the user’s web browser to automatically recognize them when logging into a merchant website. Recognition will be completed through biometrics or passcodes for authentication instead of a password.

Over time, the user purchasing experience will morph into nothing more than the merchant checkout “Pay” or “Buy” options and that will reveal a drop down of registered payment credentials available to select and then checkout. For the shopper, it’s taking the simple action of clicking the “Pay” or “Buy” button to make a purchase.

Starting out, consumers may not see visible changes to the merchant checkout page but will see additional functionality within the Visa Checkout button itself. There may also be the ability of a universal “Buy” button where all the card brands are stored in the same dropdown making it easier to purchase items online. This is effective for both consumers and merchants.

New Program Will Take Root

As a first step to roll out this program, Visa is moving its Visa Checkout base consisting of 33 million customers, 350,000 merchants, and 1,600 financial institutions to the Visa Digital Commerce Program in late 2018. Visa has communicated that merchants already accepting Visa Checkout will experience an easy conversion process and for merchants not currently using Visa Checkout, they will just need to perform a one-time integration.

Visa believes other card networks will want to participate in the program based on its SRC foundation which supports EMV, tokenized transactions, and a standardized data payload. This represents a fast track to the connected, consistent digital payments experience that consumers, merchants, and card issuers want.

By using the EMVCo SRC protocol, the payments and commerce ecosystems can focus on what’s next rather than doing multiple integrations for what’s now. With the application of digital payment standards, new opportunities are created, and the entire consumer experience will become more consistent and much more enjoyable.

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