Visa’s Fintech Fast Track Expansion: Shaping the Future of Finance

• Visa expands its Fintech Fast Track program to integrate Visa Direct, enabling fintechs to conduct transfers globally to cards, bank accounts, and wallets.
• The enhanced program provides personalized tools including Visa Direct capabilities, risk management solutions, AWS credits, and tailored consulting to foster growth and innovation for participating fintechs.

In today’s evolving payments landscape, fintechs of all shapes and sizes are seeking to carve out their unique niche. Fintech builders need ways to differentiate their offerings – and embedding payment capabilities has proven to be a successful strategy for speeding up transactions. Recognizing this, Visa is expanding its Fintech Fast Track program beyond card issuance to connect members to Visa’s real-time¹ money movement platform, Visa Direct. Additionally, Visa Consulting & Analytics has developed capabilities to support key needs of Fintech Fast Track partners.

“Fintechs are a vital growth engine for the payments industry, and Visa is committed to supporting their progress,” said Vanessa Colella, SVP, Global Head of Innovation and Digital Partnerships, Visa. “The enhanced Fast Track program offers fintechs personalized tools and resources to innovate and excel. We believe this will be a gamechanger that will catalyze new growth opportunities within this community, and further our mission to uplift everyone, everywhere.”

Visa Direct Expands Possibilities for Fintechs

With the expansion of Fast Track to include Visa Direct, fintechs can now launch programs through their financial institutions to enable transfers to eligible cards, bank accounts, and wallets around the world.

Visa Direct supports multiple use cases, such as person-to-person payments and account-to-account transfers, business and government payouts to individuals or small businesses, and merchant settlements and refunds². It provides a single point of access and reach to over 8.5 billion endpoints capability, including 3+ billion cards, 3+ billion accounts and 2.5+ billion digital wallets³.

A More Personalized Approach

The Fintech Fast Track program offers partners a solution from Visa’s menu of options, including:

• Merchant Search API: allows businesses to search for information about a merchant.
• Visa Stop Payment Service: enables financial institutions to stop payment on a specific check or range of checks.
• Visa Risk Manager solution: helps financial institutions manage and mitigate payment risks. The program now provides a 12-month free trial of this solution.

Fintech Fast Track partners now also have the opportunity to work with the Visa Consulting & Analytics team on one project from a curated selection of offerings, specifically designed to help early stage fintechs grow their portfolio.

Additionally, the program now includes the opportunity for up to $100K worth of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Activate credits for cloud consumption, business support, and personalized content and offers.

This enhanced and more personalized approach ensures fintechs receive maximum value from the Fast Track program.

Fintech Continues to Drive Growth for Visa

Over the last year, Visa has signed 42 new clients to Fintech Fast Track in North America.

“Our portfolio of fintech partners is diverse and continues to expand,” added Colella. “This generation of fintechs is addressing challenges and pain points for specific groups, professions, and online communities, and designing tools to bridge the gaps in the payment ecosystem.”

Fintechs leveraging the resources provided through Fast Track include:

• Ugami, a leading debit card for gamers. “Ugami is a company of passionate technology entrepreneurs, finance and gaming professionals focused on creating a safe and reliable and fun financial platform,” said Hector Hulian, Founder and CEO, Ugami. “With Visa, we successfully launched a debit card rewards program built for the gaming community.”
• Niural, a global payroll and HR platform for growing startups and enterprises. Niural helps businesses with payroll and contractor payments in the US and internationally in 150+ countries, using compliant contracts and payouts through their platform. Niural will be offering a business Visa Debit card to help facilitate payouts to independent workers.
• Ferry, a digital wallet built for the hospitality industry, includes solutions like tip splitting and auto-calculating tips for service workers. Ferry gives employees the ability to get paid faster, earn more, spend, save or transfer on their terms, said Shastri Mahadeo, CEO, Ferry.

To apply to the Fast Track program, visit Visa Partner I Fintech Fast Track.

¹ Actual account availability depends on receiving financial institution and region.

² Use cases are for illustrative purposes only. Program providers are responsible for their programs and compliance with any applicable laws and regulations.

³ Based on data provided by wallet aggregators.

Source: Visa