As more consumers shop online, the need for fast, secure, and convenient payments is more important than ever before. Here’s what Visa is doing to help.

Long before the effects of COVID-19 accelerated a global shift to digital for consumers and merchants, consumer spend was rapidly evolving from physical to digital^[1]. In our “new normal,” online shopping has already increased 35% in the US alone^[2]. Which is why now more than ever, Visa is focused on helping merchants by providing them with an easy way for even more online shoppers to checkout quickly and securely.

Continued momentum with new ecommerce partners

To scale merchant acceptance, Visa is expanding its Digital Commerce Program for Payment Service Providers, Gateways, and Acquirers by adding 27 new partners. As part of the program, Visa works with the acceptance ecosystem to create digital terminals, bringing the same ease of paying in person to the digital space for merchants and cardholders. Our 27 new partners include Adyen, Aurus, Bambora, BlueSnap, Cardknox, CyberSource, Dalenys, eGHL, HST, iVeri, Moneris Solutions Corporation, NA Bancard, Omise, PayPlug, and WalletDoc, among others.

Visa and its partners connect more than 61 million merchant locations*, placing us in a unique position to help broaden our digital capabilities globally. Last year, Visa launched a new click to pay experience, built on the EMVCo® Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) specification. This click to pay experience eliminates passwords and the need to manually type card details and other information necessary to complete an ecommerce transaction once a cardholder has enrolled.  While the new, interoperable checkout solution supports multiple card brands, online shoppers who enable their cards can use their Visa credit, debit, or reloadable prepaid cards to pay when they see the click to pay icon at participating merchant sites that accept Visa.

Visa has successfully migrated more than 10,000 online merchants to the click to pay experience in the US since January and is proud of the continued momentum. Now, more merchants and consumers in the US can benefit from a streamlined payment experience — either through an integrated experience within a merchant checkout page or through the click to pay button for consumers.

Digital platform partnerships

To further elevate the capabilities of digital payment experiences, Visa is partnering with Mozilla to deliver safe, secure, and widely available online payment capabilities for Firefox users. Firefox, brought to you by Mozilla, will be the first web browser to adopt click to pay with Visa as an extension of their web-based payment capabilities.

Similarly, Visa will continue to work with the World Wide Web Consortium to support standardization of our approach on web browser integrations for click to pay with Visa so that the security options provided by SRC can reach web users around the globe.

In an effort to further improve security for cardholders and the overall ecosystem, other browser players are evaluating secure remote commerce and the possibility of leveraging tokenization technology to power their PAN-based form-fill experience.

The time for tokens

A critical part of click to pay’s design incorporates an extra layer of security through interoperability with the tokenization standard. Tokenization replaces sensitive payment information with a unique identifier, or “token,” protecting the underlying sensitive payment information. The click to pay feature can also help boost authorization rates and reduce fraud rates when used with Visa Token Service, which was developed to create secure environments to help accelerate innovation in ecommerce and mobile payments. Visa Token Service recently added 28 new partners to further strengthen digital payment security globally. The latest lineup of partners will help make digital transactions more secure by tokenizing both one-time and recurring payments made with Visa credentials.

“Keeping cardholder data secure while ensuring our merchants have peace of mind when using Moneris Vault for card-on-file requirements has always been our priority,” said Patrick Diab, chief product officer at Moneris Solutions Corporation. “The Visa Token Service increases the layers of security within Moneris Vault. The ability to request a token from Visa and then provide that within a Moneris token for merchant authorization, allows merchants to benefit from the combined security and value added services offered by Moneris and Visa.”

As the impact of COVID-19 continues to reshape seemingly all aspects of daily life and business, Visa remains committed to enhancing the future of digital commerce. With the extra layer of security and support of tokenization and strategic partnerships, the click to pay experience continues to provide consistency and fewer steps at checkout. By using these new digital standards for online payments, Visa is here to make couch commerce — a trend as ubiquitous as video conferencing — as convenient as shopping in your favorite local business.

Learn more about how Visa is helping consumers shift to digital-first commerce.

This post was created by Visa with Insider Studios.

*Data provided to Visa by acquiring financial institutions and other third parties.

1. Central Bank data; Oxford Economics; Euromonitor Merchant Segment Study 2018; eMarketer; Comscore.

2. PYMNTS 2020 Remote Payments Study, April 2020