Visa has opened up its global payments network to developers releasing a set of APIs that includes 150 endpoints across all Visa products. The company has launched a new developer program and website so that developers can build applications powered by the Visa payments platform. This new set of APIs is the first of many APIs that the company plans on releasing in the coming months.
Visa launched a developer center and set of SOAP APIs back in November 2011 allowing developers to build payment applications that provide consumers the ability to pay for purchases using Visa Digital Wallet. Visa is now launching a brand new developer program which provides RESTful APIs that give programmatic access to many Visa platform capabilities. While the company has released modern RESTful APIs that return responses in JSON and XML, the old SOAP APIs are still available at this time.
ProgrammableWeb reached out to Rajat Taneja, executive vice president, technology and operations, Visa, who provided insight into the new Visa developer platform and APIs. Taneja said that the newly released set of APIs is only the first wave of APIs, the company plans on regularly releasing APIs to developers in the coming months. Developers will have access to many different Visa platform capabilities via RESTful APIs including payments, analytics, alerts, ATM locations, geographical-based data, and more.
Taneja told ProgrammableWeb that the company is using an API-first philosophy and has been dog-fooding their APIs. The company has presented a number of hackathons in the past few months where developers created innovative payment applications using the newly released Visa platform APIs. Taneja said that over 200 applications have been built with the new Visa APIs at these hackathons.
Taneja said that the company aims to make developer onboarding as fast and easy as possible. Developers can sign up and use sandbox APIs to get started building applications quickly. Once an application is ready to use production APIs, the developer must submit the application to be approved and certified by Visa. The certification process is required so that applications will meet financial government regulations when applicable.
Opening up Visa platform APIs is a massive undertaking and the company is excited about opening up their payment network to developers. Developers are welcome to use the new Visa APIs and at the time of this writing, there are no fees to use the APIs as long as Visa commercial requirements are met.
"We are unbundling Visa's full suite of products and services and giving developers open access to the underlying payment capabilities," said Taneja in the press release. "We believe this will lead to the creation of entirely new commerce experiences with Visa technology integrated to enable greater security, scale and convenience when it comes time to pay. When you add the ability to distribute those new experiences across Visa's global network, you can see why Visa Developer will become the preferred playground for developers everywhere."
For more information about the new RESTful Visa APIs, visit the Visa Developer Website.