With Visa’s introduction of its Visa+ service to Venmo and PayPal users, attention now turns to the future of the instant payment service. Having integrated the major peer-to-peer payments networks, Visa has its sights on business-to-consumer partnerships. DailyPay, Tabapay, I2c, Astra, Brightwell, Cross River Bank, and Fiserv have all either implemented Visa+ for sending funds to customers or plan to do so this year.
The “killer app” aspect of Visa+ has always been the ability to send and receive money between different P2P services. This concept is now being expanded to offer interoperability to merchant clients, offering real-time business-to-consumer disbursements, streamlined transaction processing, and fraud management capabilities.
Sophia Gonzalez, Analyst for Debit Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, foresaw these developments in a piece for PaymentsJournal last year. “As the demand for instant payments grows in the U.S., payment providers will need to catch up with the trend,” Gonzalez wrote. “It is providing an excellent opportunity for smaller payment providers to keep up with the demand as they leverage the technical infrastructure provided. We expect more payment providers to partner with Visa+ in the future.”
Inside the Visa+ System
Visa+ allows eligible consumers to set up or enable a unique Visa+ “payname” account associated with a receive-only Visa token. A payname is a payment-specific address that frees users from having to share a phone number or other account details with other users, adding a layer of fraud protection. Visa stores the token on its own and links it to the user’s wallet account.
The sender can submit payments by entering the recipient’s payname in their digital wallet. At that point, an Original Credit Transaction (OCT) is initiated as a push payment, pushing the funds directly into the cardholder’s account.
One advantage of Visa+ is that users are not required to have a Visa-branded debit or credit card to use it. This flexibility allows the service to support a wider range of payment-related use cases. With the expansion into B2C applications, we could see much more transactions like instant payouts for gig workers’ earned wages, creators’ earnings, and marketplace sellers’ sales proceeds.
As Gonzalez noted, there are millions of users across digital wallets, neobanks, and other payment apps who have embraced interoperability with Visa+ and given Visa’s sheer size and the volume of transactions flowing through their systems, this instant payment capability is expected to make a notable impact.