Faster Business: What are the Benefits of Visa Direct?

What is Visa Direct and why is it so popular for payment transactions? We answer these questions here, in our latest article.

Time is money – it’s a cliché, but it’s one of those clichés that springs from a hard business truth.

Any delay in the payments process being used by a business is a form of friction which is going to impact, more than anywhere else, on the bottom line. That impact may mean disappointed customers, lost sales or poor market access, but in all cases, any delay in handling the funds moving in and out of your business is going to cause problems.

That’s why we offer Visa Direct.

What is Visa Direct?

Visa Direct leverages the global reach of Visa and combines it with the latest technology to create a payment platform which operates in virtual real time 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. It can be used for person to person (P2P), business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) payments.

Whereas payments to Visa Debit or prepaid cards could take as long as 5 business days to reach an account, those made with Visa Direct land within 30 minutes.

By utilising the power of Visa Direct we enable our customers to send and receive funds between literally billions of worldwide accounts in a seamless and highly secure manner. Traditional points of friction such as cross border trading are removed by a system which operates on a global basis, with more than 75 countries enjoying real time or same day delivery.

What makes Visa Direct so special?

Every business which operates on a global basis needs a comprehensive payments platform (like Noire’s).

Complexities arising from the use of different currencies, conflicting payment conventions and overlapping regulatory regimes are dealt with by Noire and Visa Direct rather than by your business or your customers.

By integrating seamlessly with any existing user interface, Visa Direct doesn’t simply deliver an effective solution, it does so in a way which is simple to use at every point of contact.

On a personal basis, as cashless transactions begin to dominate more of our lives, it can be tempting to assume that the framework for transferring funds effortlessly is already firmly in place.

Within a single market or jurisdiction this might be the case (although it should never be taken for granted) but as recently as April 2020, the G20 group of countries published a report entitled ‘Enhancing Cross Border Payments’ which, amongst other things, set out the complexity of many current arrangements for cross border payments. Among the many challenges set out in the technical background report were the following:

• Some transfers between jurisdictions can still take as long as 10 days and cost as much as 10% of the value of the transfer
• Payments sent from the UK to certain territories have to pass through four currencies and five banks
• Some cross-border payment systems still make use of out-dated technology such as telex machines
• Despite advances in technology, 6 out of 10 cross-border payments still require manual intervention, each one of which takes as long as 15 to 20 minutes

This is the backdrop against which Visa Direct is operating, and it is the nightmare of cross-border payments which all too many businesses had to accept until relatively recently – or are perhaps even now still struggling with.

Visa Direct is all about removing these barriers by dint of being able to reach 99% of bank accounts in 88 countries, dealing with more than 160 currencies and, during the 2019 financial year, facilitating 2 billion transactions.

Key benefits of Visa Direct

One of the key benefits of Visa direct is that it lets users at both ends of a transaction work through a single access point.

This saves time, cuts costs and enhances the user experience, making previously complicated cross-border and multi-currency payment arrangements as simple as the average tap and pay in a coffee shop.

The flexibility of the platform enables it to scale up or down with your business, handling payments at scale through a range of industry standard formats.

The robust security systems employed by Visa across its global network act as reassurance for anyone using Visa Direct, with the strictest possible risk and compliance controls in place across a tried and trusted network of approved partners.

The security measures used by Visa have moved beyond even firmly established encryption techniques to embrace technologies such as tokenization, which is both more secure and more cost effective (rendering any hacked data useless for the purposes of fraud), and predictive analytics, which analyses as many as 500 attributes of a transaction to flag up any risk of fraud.

Visa Direct – saves time & money

The very best business solutions are those which take previously complex problems and turn them into elegant, simple solutions.

The combination of Noire and Visa Direct does exactly that when it comes to facilitating cross-border payments of every kind.

Saving time and therefore money is just one part of the equation, since Visa Direct also enables businesses to access hitherto inaccessible markets, trading at speed across borders, thousands of miles, multiple languages and a range of global currencies.

In the digital age, instant access is everything, and in the post-COVID marketplace, remote delivery of services will become a standard offering and not an optional extra.

By utilising Visa Direct through Noire, your business can position itself to move seamlessly into this new reality, providing your customers with the kind of experience which they need to be able to take for granted, and enable you to concentrate on core business activity with your payment services in the safest possible hands.

Why you should use NOIRE

At NOIRE, we are a leading boutique payments service provider, offering the most advanced and sophisticated payments and risk technologies to global public companies and eCommerce start-ups.

We provide fast pay-outs for merchants, enabling them to send money to customers for pay-outs, account withdrawals and winnings.

There are many different ways to do a refund, but typically, a refund in ecommerce is a direct payment back to a customer’s card for the same amount they paid for the product or service. This can take up to 3 days to appear back on the customer’s statement, creating additional frustrations for customers and merchant support desks.

Many types of businesses struggle with this basic refund function, such as FOREX, CFD, spread betting and gaming. They want to send money back, of different amounts, to their, so the payout functionality is essential. The basic refund function, therefore, was never really designed to accommodate this.

“Merchants that use NOIRE have a competitive advantage in their industries. They can send in real time pay-outs to their customers cards”, said Tim Thompson, CEO NOIRE.

Essentially, NOIRE merchants can send money to billions of cards and accounts worldwide; both domestic and cross border, in over 160 currencies. This is great news for these types of merchants.

 For fast pay-outs and get the competitive advantage, get in touch with us today.