Visa Launches “Visa Checkout”

Visa Inc. announced a new simplified digital payment service called Visa Checkout, which is designed to allow customers to pay quickly for goods online on any connected device.
Visa CEO Charles Scharf described the service as “your Visa card for the digital world.”
The event was attended by officials from several companies planning to use the new service, including Neiman Marcus, Pizza Hut, Staples, and United Airlines.
This is not the first time Visa has made this pitch. Checkout replaces an earlier effort, V.me, that launched with similar promises (and its own set of partners) back in 2011.
Visa is looking to both protect its existing payments business and expand into new areas, where it faces a host of competitors including MasterPass from familiar rival MasterCard, as well as digital-born companies such as Amazon and PayPal. This time around, Visa said it isn’t trying to be a destination site, but rather just to speed up online transactions. With Checkout, Visa says that transactions can take as little as five seconds.
Visa pitched Checkout as part of a broader company effort to remake itself for a new era. The company opened up a new San Francisco office designed to work with a broader array of partners including technology companies large and small.
“We are a very different Visa than we have been in the past,” Scharf said.

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