Visa

VisaNet History

A Singular Vision

Visa has a singular vision: To provide consumers, businesses and governments with a better form of payment. Since VisaNet began in the early 1970s, there has been a fundamental shift away from traditional forms of payment — cash and checks — to more convenient, reliable and secure electronic payments. The speed, flexibility and reliability of VisaNet have been a major catalyst in this shift.

A Catalyst of Change

VisaNet was one of the world’s first electronic credit card authorization systems. Since then, Visa has invested billions in continually improving, refining and expanding VisaNet. That investment ensures this global processing system stays ahead of the growing demand for electronic payments, as people come to use Visa in more places and for more reasons every day.

A History of Innovation

Key milestones in VisaNet’s history include:

• 1973 – National BankAmericard Inc. (NBI) launches one of the first electronic authorization system, followed a year later by an electronic clearing and settlement system, the precursors to VisaNet.
• 1986 – Visa becomes the first payment card system to offer multiple-currency clearing and settlement, providing financial institutions with faster restitution and greatly increasing transaction efficiency.
• 1993 – Visa is the first to apply state-of-the-art neural network technologies to payments, potentially reducing fraud by giving Visa member banks smarter and timelier data about suspicious transactions.
• 1995 – Visa co-develops industry-wide chip card specifications, Europay/MasterCard/Visa (EMV), to ensure that all chip cards operate with all chip-reading terminals.
• 2005 – Visa opens a new transaction processing center and implements a new, re-engineered authorization processing platform with a streamlined, modular architecture to expand the capacity and capabilities of VisaNet. This paves the way for the next generation of Visa transaction processing and value-added services.
• 2007 – Visa launches the Visa mobile platform, a business and technology framework for facilitating mobile payments and value-added services.
• 2009 – Visa upgrades VisaNet’s authorization operating system, significantly expanding processing memory and improving the speed and intelligence of the processing engine. The system can now perform complex processing functions with no impact on transaction speed.
• 2011 – Visa continues to provide consumers, businesses and governments with a better form of payment. Since VisaNet's inception as one of the world's first electronic credit card authorization systems, Visa has invested valuable time and assets into continually improving, refining and expanding its global processing system. This investment ensures VisaNet stays ahead of growing demand for electronic payments, as people come to use Visa in more ways than ever before.
• 2013 – Visa launches the Visa Mobile Managed Service, a new mobile money platform that allows Visa to host and fully manage all aspects of a mobile money program on behalf of a provider.