Visa is not dropping Visa Checkout yet, but senior execs seem to be pointing it to the exit judging by recent comments in a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Both Visa Checkout and Mastercard’s Masterpass programs are likely a victim of plans for the launch of a new single pay button.
Single pay button just makes sense
“We’ve been committed to Visa Checkout, we remain committed to Visa Checkout, especially in certain geographies and for certain merchants where they see value,” Visa chief executive Alfred F. Kelly Jr. said on the Q2 2018 quarterly earnings conference call. “I think the ultimate future is to move to this EMVCo standard, which creates a single button, which is much more analogous to the situation that you see in the physical world where there’s a single terminal and all products run through that terminal.”
Kelly said a single button with multiple choices is a smarter solution for consumers, merchants and payments processors. He said the new Secure Remote Commerce framework and standards that EMVCo is developing simply makes business sense for everyone.
“We will use Visa Checkout in those parts of the world where it clearly is a valuable option for people, especially outside the U.S. In the U.S. there are merchants who would see value in it; we would definitely use Visa Checkout as a solution there. Once this single-button solution is available, then we’ll just have to see how that plays between the Visa Checkout option and the single button,” said Kelly.
Visa’s business keeps growing
While Visa Checkout may be headed for the lockers, Visa’s overall business is booming. Worldwide payments totaled $1.99 trillion in the second quarter, up 14.9% over 2017. Credit card payments in the US were up 10.5% reaching $446 billion.
The number of transactions on Visa’s global network also grew substantially to 29.3 billion transactions processed, up nearly 12% from second-quarter 2017.
Visa’s Q2 net income was equally impressive, totaling $2.61 billion, an increase of 506% over Q2 2016.
Let’s just say Visa had a very good second-quarter 2018 and keep your eye out for new developments on the single pay button.
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