Visa is a multinational financial services corporation located in California, USA. It’s a global payments company with the main goal to make every electronic fund transfer easier all over the world. It is possible now to connect businesses, consumers, government, and financial institutions quickly and securely.
The reason behind their success throughout the years is an effective association with the technology and they always try to upgrade their service in order to provide the highest quality. Recently, they have launched the visa provisioning service and, in this article, I would like to provide detailed information regarding it.
Visa provisioning service first was introduced on the market by the company on 27 February in 2012. The meeting took place in Barcelona, Spain at Mobile World Congress where they announced the service and noted that it was made in collaboration with Oberthur Technologies.
What Is Visa Provisioning Service?
Visa provisioning service means to easily download the payment account details to the mobile phone with the help of an effective feature called NFC. This service is convenient especially for mobile network operators and some other organizations.
NFC stands for Near Field Communication and even though it’s a wireless communication technology it covers very little area. Recently, the NFC has been an extremely useful method for different kinds of payments performed by the mobile, and the fact that Google Wallet utilizes this technology for mobile payment proves it.
Visa provisioning service turns out to be a very secure and comfortable method to connect people’s NFC smartphone to the payment account of Visa and as a result, it can be used by various sources such as banks, transit and network operators, and so on. This service made it possible for businesses and consumers to use mobile payments daily and set it as a primary one.
Visa Provisioning Service Features
As we have already mentioned, the visa provisioning service is based on NFC technology. However, what you need to take into consideration is that the NFC technology is not featured in most modern smartphones including iPhone, so not everyone can enjoy this service.
Therefore, in order to utilize a visa provisioning service, you need to have a mobile device that has an enabled NFC chip. This service uses over the air activation method and it is available when your smartphone is in “switched on” mode.
Another advantageous feature of the visa provisioning service is that it can be utilized for either Visa payments, as well as non-Visa transactions. It is extremely flexible for transit applications also. You have the possibility to download your applications of mobile payments on your smartphone and with the help of NFC technology, you can pay for services in distinct cities.
How Visa Provisioning Service Works?
Visa provisioning service requires several steps in order to get successful results. I’m going to list these steps below and show you how you can enjoy this service.
- We have already highlighted that not every smartphone contains NFC technology. Therefore, the first step is to purchase a smartphone which includes the technology of NFC and it does not matter which brand it will be.
- After you get this type of smartphone, the next thing you have to do is activating the mobile payment. You can do this by communicating with the service provider or Visa account issuing institution.
- When you request the activation, the officials will activate the mobile phone payment in your device.
- You need to enter the right password in order to authenticate and process the payment. If the wrong password is entered the payment will be cancelled.
- When you authenticate, then NFC technology begins to exchange some secure and credential keys among the parties.
- After that, the payment account details will be downloaded to your mobile phone.
These are the necessary steps required for achieving the visa provisioning service. As you can see, it’s not a hard and complicated process and you can get successful results easily.
Visa Provisioning Service Benefits
Visa provisioning service provides several beneficial features such as
Advanced Mobile Payments
It gives you an opportunity to make payments everywhere even when you are in distinct places. This shows how much progress has been made in the mobile payment market. Nowadays, you can easily link your smartphone to your Visa account and as a result, the connection between consumers and businesses became much easier.
Smooth Payment and Ease of Connection
Visa provisioning service make the mobile payments easier not only for consumers by also for the banks, operators, and transit operators. The over the air service is used with the company’s payWave mobile payments system and it’s able to deploy over the air.
The operators have the opportunity to easily make payments that have been supported on mobile. The visa provisioning service has tremendously enhanced mobile payment operations.
Future of Visa Provisioning Service
The future of visa provisioning service is not clear. We have already mentioned, that it uses NFC technology which is not features in a lot of new generation smartphones. The iPhone is one of the biggest brands on the market which does not include this technology, so its customers don’t have the ability to use it.
Replacing your smartphone for this particular reason does not seem to be a good idea. Therefore, Visa should come up with some innovative methods for non-NFC smartphones in order to broaden the service area.
Wrapping Up
In this article, we have explained the meaning of the visa provisioning service. It is definitely a big development and evolution in the mobile payment market. This service is effective for everyone starting from consumers to different institutions and operators as it is extremely easy to connect with each other and provide payments.
We have noted above a major drawback which is NFC technology not being featured in most modern smartphones. This is a real issue and it needs to be addressed. We hope Visa will come up with useful ideas to let everyone enjoy the visa provisioning service.
