As the global economy works to recover from the damaging effects of the Covid 19 Pandemic, Visa has pushed through with perhaps its most innovative payments solution yet!

The global economy moves forward each and every day, depending on the exchange of billions of dollars. Contactless payments and online transfers have seen exponential growth with adoption of wearable payment technologies seeing increased growth. As shared by the Motley Fool Visa Direct is a solution that enables individuals, businesses, and governments to instantly send or receive money directly using its existing global payments network of bank connections and debit cards to “push” money from one bank account to another. “Push payments can be facilitated faster because the sender is sending both the payment instruction and the money, which speeds up recognition from the banks.”

Key factors contributing to the advancement of this exciting innovation include:

• Global adoption
• Strategic partnerships
• Competitive marketplace

This solution connects 5 billion cards in more than 200 jurisdictions and 160 currencies, truly bringing the globe together. Visa has acquired control of Earthport. This partnership, promotes “the ability to move money globally and efficiently, and at scale…”, simplifying the entire process.  All this while maintaining “bank-grade-type compliance and risk management in the operating structure provided by Visa’s network.”

Use cases include:

• Business-to-business: enabling businesses to pay freelancers, contractors, and other small businesses – in real time.
• Business-to-consumer: enabling businesses to send almost any kind of payment directly to a bank account – such as insurance payouts and real-time merchant settlement.
• Person-to-person: enabling consumers to pay each other quickly, conveniently, and securely, often through their connected devices – such as when splitting bills or giving gifts.

Visa Direct is facilitating strategic partnerships with well known global brands including Airbnb, Moneygram, Forward thinking entities such as these are garnering the strength of this product to gain access to their funds faster and with greater efficiency. By streamlining the payment process, Visa Direct enables the merchant to both send and receive monies, peer to peer via. online transactions at much lower costs than with traditional cross border payments and within a fraction of the time.

FINTECH, Financial technology, is an emerging industry that uses technology to improve activities in finance. The advent of this sector has prompted multiple entrants into this space. MasterCard,PayPal and Square have each developed money transfer functionalities within their digital wallets, adding pressure to traditional banks and service providers to compete with lower fees and improved service. Competition in the marketplace, within the entire financial sector, will only result in great wins for consumers, worldwide.