Visa has introduced new features under Visa Accept and Visa Direct, enabling small businesses in emerging markets to accept and send digital payments directly through smartphones.
Visa Accept turns a smartphone into a card terminal, allowing micro sellers to accept tap-to-pay or pay-by-link transactions through their Visa debit or prepaid accounts without additional hardware.
Funds are credited to seller accounts in near real-time.
The service is currently live in more than 25 countries. Partner banks include HNB in Sri Lanka, Banco Agromercantil de Guatemala, and the SACOMBANK and VPBank in Vietnam. Banks in Kenya and Ghana are expected to launch the service soon.
Visa Direct complements this by enabling small business owners to send real-time payouts, including cross-border transfers, to staff, contractors and customers from the same banking app.
Shahebaz Khan, regional commercial solutions head at Visa, said the initiative aims to let a single smartphone manage payment acceptance, business insights and overall operations for small businesses.
