Visa 2014 Annual Report Download - page 9

and individuals we have not
historically dealt with directly.
This includes larger companies,
but also much smaller
companies and, as importantly,
the developer community
that can build experiences for
multiple ecosystems.
To engage with these new
partners, we’re actively
working on a series of things:
First, we are calling on these
new partners just as we
would our traditional clients,
collaborating and creating
commercial relationships and
new payments experiences.
This broad range of companies
includes device manufacturers,
social ecosystem providers,
mobile network operators, and
more.
Second, we are creating
physical spaces which will
encourage collaboration
and co-innovation with our
partners. This summer we
launched the first of these
in San Francisco. It houses
three distinct, but related
physical spaces to further
our efforts. One is our new,
state of the art client briefing
center where we will be able
to tell our story and showcase
technology that our partners
and we are developing. We
have also built a design studio
and an incubator facility
where software engineers and
user experience resources,
from both inside and
outside of Visa, will sit side
by side with existing clients
and new partners to work
collaboratively on building
new experiences, which we
hope to commercialize.
Third, we are looking for
opportunities to co-invest,
understanding what early
stage capabilities are being
funded, looking to partner
with those technologies and
experiences that can scale, and
determining if we should be
the ultimate buyer of some of
these companies.
We are pleased with the early
results of these efforts and
expect to see even more
progress in 2015.
• We partnered with Apple,
and coordinated with issuers
and acquirers, to develop
and launch Apple Pay.
• We’re investing in
companies that we believe
can help drive payment
electronification. For
example, in 2014 we made
investments in DocuSign
and LoopPay. Investments
like this keep us close to
other innovators in the
payments space and
provide opportunities for us
to build upon our network
capabilities in new ways.
• We acquired a strategic
license of TrialPay’s
technology and had a small
team from TrialPay join Visa
to lead the development
of a new product platform
designed to help merchants
acquire more customers and
sales opportunities.
Transform Visa’s Technology
Assets
Our technology in many
ways has defined us and has
always played a vital role in
our success and this includes
our architecture, platforms,
and tools. As we look forward,
technology will continue to
be our great enabler, only
it will become significantly
more prominent. Historically,
technology supported
business solutions. Today,
technology creates business
solutions. We are evolving
our own platforms and tools
while embracing the values
and skills of great technology
companies. This significant
transformation in how we
operate inside and outside
of our company is a must do
for us.
Technology is the core of what
drives Visa. Opportunities
today to use our technology
are infinite, but we need to
take this great technology
platform we have created and
continue its evolution.
To work with new partners
participating in commerce,
we are building access points
into our capabilities that don’t
exist today while ensuring
that we preserve the role
and economic participation
of our existing clients – the
issuers and acquirers. Building
these access points requires
us to rethink how we interact
with partners as well as the
software assets that exist and
requires a significant new set
of activities inside of Visa.
Going forward, we will expose
our core network capabilities
to a broader set of participants
who can integrate our
unique payment assets into
the experiences they create.
In order to do this, we are
building an enterprise class
developer center (software
- not a physical space),
First and foremost, we need to be thought leaders
and enablers of commerce, as we will be the
beneficiaries through enabling payments.