Visa sees bright future for Asia Pacific business

Chris Clarke, Regional President, Asia-Pacific, Visa, says that Visa is not a financial services company, but a payment technology company. "We invented our own industry," he said the year Visa is celebrating its 60^th anniversary, which is also its 50th in the Asia Pacific region (APAC).

Clarke.

Clarke shared at the recent Visa AP Security Summit 2018 in Singapore that the company evolved from the BankAmericard, a pilot programme with recruited merchants and cards given to 60,000 households in the US by the Bank of America in 1958, said Clarke. While the card failed initially due to credit card fraud and defaulting customers, more controls eventually turned the credit card into a viable financial instrument.

The firsts have continued, with Visa first neural network for fraud protection as far back as 2013. "You could say that Visa was the original disruptor, Visa was the original fintech," he said.

The company, renamed Visa in 1976, has over 3.2 billion cards today, and 46 million merchants around the world. 2001 marked the 1 billion card milestone, and things are expected to change as the traditional plastic card gives way to a broader approach to pay and be paid.

Clarke predicts that with the Internet of Things (IoT) evolving, there will be 30 billion ways to pay instead of "just" 3 billion. "You're not going to be paid at 46 million shops around the world, there will be 400 million places," he said. "Everything now that we are seeing and buying that is connected in some way shape or form to the cloud - so many of these things have the capacity to accept payment."

Collaboration and partnership will make 30 billion ways to pay a reality, he added. 

Within APAC, growth can be expected in many countries as income levels rise outside of the main cities, Clarke said. "In all the countries you can see the growth in Visa's payment growth. In that period payment growth has been four to five times in a 10-year period," he said. "A lot of that is based on a shift from the traditional piece of plastic to the almost 1.2 billion smartphone users that we have in the region."

He pointed out that in Thailand, for instance, high growth had traditionally come from Bangkok but that rising income levels outside of Bangkok, making more point of sale (PoS) devices available, working with more merchants and a reciprocal interest from banks to issue cards have all worked to expand growth forecasts. Indonesia is also on the upswing as people are moving to using social media, and new forms of e-commerce like ride hailing company Go-Jek, he added. 

The company is open to partnering, collaborations, commercial relationships and investment, Clarke said. "We can't do everything on our own, especially at this time of exploding fintech and exploding opportunity," he said.

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