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Co v er St o r y

Visa pushes for P2P interoperability Consumers will activate Paze wallets through their banks,
or alternately at participating websites. When multiple
Visa wants to become a clearing house for P2P payments. Later cards have been loaded onto the wallet, the consumer
this year, the payments company will start testing a service called chooses the default card and can override that as needed.
All card numbers are tokenized, Anderson added.
Visa+ that will allow consumers to send payments across plat-
forms, seamlessly. PayPal and Venmo will be first to test Visa+. EWS already operates Zelle, but that digital wallet is limit-
While Venmo is owned by PayPal, there is no interoperability ed to person-to-person payments that get cleared through
between the two platforms. Visa+ does not require users to have the ACH. It can take days to clear a payment through the
Visa cards. Instead, by setting up personalized payment address- ACH, which is why Zelle has been dealing with fraud is-
sues, stated Prakash Natarajan, managing director, pay-
es linked to their Venmo or PayPal accounts, individuals using ment strategy, at the consultancy Strategic Resource Man-
either app will be able to send and receive payments quickly and agement.
securely between platforms.
Paze will be an ecommerce wallet with transactions clear-
Visa said that once the service is road-tested with PayPal and ing over the credit card rails. Visa and Mastercard, initial-
Venmo, it will expand Visa+ to include other P2P platforms. ly, Anderson stated, but over time, he hopes to get buy-in
from other card networks.
Specifically, Visa named as future partners: DailyPay, a payroll
service that provides early access to earned wages; Western "Our members are invested in the card networks; they're
Union; TabaPay; and i2c, a global platform used to build digital not looking to throw that out," he said.
credit and payment products. PayPal was already on board with "The banks are trying to assert their place" in the consum-
interoperability last year, when it disclosed, along with Apple, er shopping experience, Natarajan said. "When using a
plans for the two companies to accept each other's payments technology company's wallet app, the [card-issuing bank's
products. It's a bit different from Visa' plan, but the idea is for brand] is subsumed."
PayPal merchants to be able to accept contactless payments on
their iPhones using Apple's Tap to Pay technology. Both Visa Ron Herman, founder and CEO of payments company
Sionic, said, "Banks don't like the fact they don't have their
and Mastercard have developed similar technologies that allow fingers on the data" when, for example, cardholders use
merchants to accept contactless payments on their mobile de- PayPal.
vices.
The card networks work well for payments, Anderson
"Consumers continue to seek simple and seamless ways to digi- said, but the process of paying by card for ecommerce pur-
tally move money between friends and family, including the chases can be clunky. "We're trying to fix the user experi-
ence," he said. "This is a better form of card acceptance for
ability to send money between different payment platforms," the online world."
said Chris Newkirk, global head of new payment flows at Visa.
"Through this collaboration, Visa+ can help break down bar- A crowded market
riers for payment app users as they connect, engage and move Paze is entering a crowded market that has sunk others.
money." There was MCX (for Merchant Customer Exchange), a QR
code-based mobile wallet created by a consortium of large
Tim Astanov, head of commercialization at instant payment retailers to bypass banks and interchange.
network TabaPay, added, "This new and innovative solution for The consortium eventually failed, its technology pur-
chased by JPMorgan Chase and integrated into Chase Pay.
the fintech community will remove friction and make instant
money movement easier for our clients and their customers." Then there was the consortium of telecommunications
Jason Tinder, head of marketing at TabaPay, described Visa+ as firms that had the misfortune of launching a mobile wal-
a "game changer" in a LinkedIn post, explaining how it "has the let called ISIS just before that word became synonymous
potential to revolutionize the way people transact with each oth- with an international terrorist organization.
er and the way fintechs engage with their users." Ron Herman, It was renamed Softcard and eventually purchased by
CEO of the real-time payments company Sionic, believes in- Google for integration with its mobile wallet.
teroperability between P2P platforms is inevitable, but suggested
it may be premature. "Fraud is still a problem," he said, pointing "We've seen this movie before," said Richard Crone of
to widely reported scams involving Zelle and Venmo. Linking Crone Consulting. Crone, who worked on CyberCase, one
of the first digital wallets for ecommerce, said the biggest
networks that each have their own fraud issues "is a recipe for an challenge Paze faces is getting merchants on board.
acceleration in fraud," he added.

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