Visa Inc. signs up 2,300 financial institutions for Visa Token Service

More than 2,300 financial institutions and banking partners have now signed up for Visa’s tokenization service with international expansion set to happen “in the fall”, Visa has revealed during a third quarter earnings call. The company has also signed up 160,000 merchants and five million registered users to Visa Checkout, and expects to resolve discussions around a merger with Visa Europe by the end of October.

“We continue to expand the Visa Token Service,” CEO Charlie Scharf told investors, according to nfcworld.com. “More than 2,300 financial institutions and banking partners are participating — in addition, Apple Pay in the US and Google globally. International expansion of our token service will begin later in the fall within our US, Canada and Asia-Pacific regions and allows us to begin tokenizing Visa Checkout.

“On Visa Checkout, we continue to gain momentum. We have over 270 financial institution partners globally. We have over 160,000 merchants who are currently live globally, with over US$50bn in total addressable volume. New merchant partners include US companies such as Under Armour, Taco Bell, Dunkin’ Donuts, Williams-Sonoma, Eddie Bauer, Living Social in Canada, and Starbucks in Australia.”
“To date, we have over five million registered users and we’ve launched Visa Checkout in 16 markets around the world. New markets include China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, Colombia, the UAE and South Africa, to name a few.”

Visa Checkout was launched in July last year to let consumers pay for goods online, on any device, in “just a few clicks.” It reported four million registered users and 125,000 accepting merchants in May this year.

Visa launched its Visa Token Service in September 2014 to enable card account numbers to be replaced with digital tokens. The company announced its expansion plans for the service in February this year, revealing it would be rolled out to “more regions, to a range of mobile devices and to online transactions made using its Visa Checkout service in 2015.”