Visa seeks P2P interoperability

Visa wants to bring interoperability to the person-to-person payments space. Later this year, the company will begin testing a service it calls Visa+ which is designed so folks can send money seamlessly across platforms without the need for personally identifiable information.

With Visa+, users create personalized payment addresses that are linked to their P2P payment accounts.

First up to test Visa+, beginning later this year, will be PayPal and Venmo. While Venmo is owned by PayPal, there is no interoperability between the two platforms. But with Visa+, someone will be able to initiate a payment on PayPal for instant delivery to a registered Venmo user. General availability of Visa+ is slated for mid-2024.

"Consumers continue to seek simple and seamless ways to digitally move money between friends and family, including the ability to send money between different payment platforms," said Chris Newkirk, global head of new payment flows at Visa. "Through this collaboration, Visa+ can help break down barriers for payment app users as they connect, engage and move money."

"This new and innovative solution for the fintech community will remove friction and make instant money movement easier for our clients and their customers," said Tim Astanov, head of commercialization at TabaPay, an instant payment network that supports early wage access and loan payouts, and Visa partner.

Sophia Gonzalez, a research analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, declared Visa+ "an A+ in our book."

"We like that it does not require yet another account creation," Gonzalez recently blogged. "It enables more payment-related use cases, including instant payouts for earned wages of gig workers, creators and marketplace sellers"

Gonzalez added that "Given Visa's sheer size and number of transactions that fly on their rails, it will make an impact by providing this instant payment capability. It is building interoperability across payment platforms, something that hasn't been achieved yet," she noted.

Full-scale rollout in 2024

Americans clearly like making P2P payments digitally. The Pew Research Center reported that better than three out of four (76 percent) adults have used at least one P2P service to send money to family, friends and merchants.

PayPal is most popular, with 57 percent of consumers saying they have used it, followed by Venmo (38 percent), the bank-owned Zelle network (36 percent) and Block's Cash App (26 percent).

But the fact that payments can take up to three days to complete, means these are not really "instant" payments; they are not much faster than a traditional ACH payment. With Visa+ these payments will settle instantly in real time.

Visa said that once the service is road-tested with PayPal and Venmo, it will expand Visa+ to include other P2P platforms. Specifically, Visa named DailyPay, a payroll service that provides early access to earned wages, Western Union, TabaPay, and i2c, a global platform used to build digital credit and payment products.

Not mentioned in Visa's press release were popular P2P platforms Zelle (bank-owned) and Cash App (Block owned).

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