What is Visa Direct?

You might not realize it, but there are many different ways to transfer money, each one with its own set of pros and cons. One way to transfer money globally is Visa Direct, which is Visa’s answer to near real-time transfers between one account and another. 

In a world that demands speed and convenience, we’ve come to expect instant results. The way we send and receive money is not immune to this. Visa Direct is an innovation that has transformed the payments landscape. Long gone are the days of expensive, insecure, slow transfers that preceded it. It’s become a key player allowing businesses and consumers to move money quickly and securely.

With businesses giving everything a digital refresh, why leave out payments? Creating a fancy app is great for the user experience, but if that same experience falls at the last hurdle - the payout - by taking days to reach the customer, is it as great as it seems? 

What is Visa Direct?

Visa Direct is a payment service that enables real-time money transfers quickly and securely using Visa’s global network. It’s a payment method that lets a business move funds from its account to a customer’s account. 

Visa Direct is a popular way for businesses to send money to customers, but it’s also used for peer-to-peer (P2P) and business-to-business (B2B) payments. While other similar payment solutions can take up to 24 hours for the money to reach the recipient, Visa Direct transactions are designed to be completed almost instantly - in up to 30 minutes - adding to their appeal. 

Visa is one of the world’s largest payment networks, so using Visa Direct benefits from its extensive, global network – allowing money to be sent to and received from millions of accounts around the world. For merchants, it’s a great way to scale your business and speed up the process of international payments. 

How does Visa Direct work?

Visa Direct facilitates both push and pull payments, but push payments is the more innovative offering. Visa Direct uses push payments to allow businesses to send funds directly to customers’ cards, reducing the processing time compared to pull transactions. 

What differentiates push and pull payments is that push payments are initiated by the payer. They work via the acquiring bank pushing funds to the customer’s card. Conversely, pull payments are initiated by the payee, and work via the merchant’s bank pulling funds from the customer’s card. 

Push payments are quicker because the sender is responsible for both the money and the payment instructions, which accelerates recognition from banks. 

Let’s break it down into stages.

1. The business sends the money to the acquirer
2. The acquirer sends a request to fund the cardholder’s account via Visa’s network, in a single connection, to the issuer
3. The Issuer honors the request, so the money is paid by the acquirer to the issuer
4. The money is then received in the customer’s account

To transfer funds via Visa Direct, businesses only need the recipient’s Visa credit or debit card number – no other financial details are required. The customer doesn’t need to perform any action at all. 

1. A user initiates a payment request through an app or website that uses Visa Direct
2. Visa uses its secure network to authenticate the transaction details
3. Visa Direct processes the transaction, while the card network transfers the money
4. The money reaches the recipient’s account or card within 30 minutes

Why choose Visa Direct?

There’s a wide range of benefits for your business when using Visa Direct.

Speed

Visa Direct works in real-time, meaning the transfer of funds should reach your customers’ accounts in less than 30 minutes. In addition, it also works 24/7, so you’ll never have to leave your customers waiting. In today’s fast-paced environment, time is essential.

In a digital society that’s become accustomed to instant results, delays in sending and receiving money will likely hurt your business. Any element of friction can lead to impatient customers, which can lead to customer drop-off, which leads to lost sales, which leads to reduced revenue, and so on. 

In a survey commissioned by Visa, 82% of consumers said they would be more likely to work with a business that offers fast disbursements through push-to-card. 

Payroll disbursements and emergency payments are just two examples of payment types that benefit from Visa Direct’s near-instant transfers. Waiting five business days for a payment to reach an account is a thing of the past. 

Convenience and simplicity

Speed is convenience in and of itself. But there’s more that makes Visa Direct convenient and simple for your customers, such as the fact you can transfer money to cards they’re already carrying around with them. 

Visa’s use of its Alias Directory service lets users link accounts, digital wallets, or card credentials to email addresses or cellphone numbers for easier transfers. This helps customers keep their card details private and avoid the hassle of finding them. However, this feature isn’t available globally or in all Visa Direct implementations.

In addition, Visa Direct simplifies the user experience of making payments compared to more traditional methods like ACH or wire transfers. 

Streamline

Transferring funds in real-time means you can get confirmation they have been received by your customer’s financial institution there and then. This can help you streamline your business operations and make your business finances easier to manage.

Cross-border payments

With cross-border payments, Visa Direct can be used to send money across borders in 190+ markets and between 160 currencies. Merchants who work with global Payment Service Providers (PSPs) that offer Visa Direct, like Checkout.com, can lighten the load of expensive and time-consuming cross-border payments and bring on a global customer base.

Sending money in different currencies can be complex, and different regions have different payment conventions and regulations. Some cross-border transfers for other payment methods still take as long as 10 days and cost as much as 10% of the value of the transfer, according to the G20 ‘Enhancing Cross Border Payments’ report. Visa Direct significantly reduces the time and cost of cross-border transfers. 

Leave all the hard work to Visa Direct, no global payment network of your own is required. 

Secure

Visa Direct ensures both funds and data are handled securely to omit risk from the equation. Benefit from Visa’s trusted financial network and industry-leading, multi-layered payment security protocols that will keep you protected and reduce the risk of fraud. Get innovative tools, knowledge, and experience backed by the security and reliability of one of the world’s largest electronic payment networks. 

Visa uses security methods such as tokenization and predictive analytics to ensure top-tier security. Tokenization essentially makes any hacked data useless for fraudsters, while predictive analytics helps to flag signs of fraud. 

Visa’s scale means it has monitored billions of transactions that help inform its fraud detection capabilities. 

Customer satisfaction

Inevitably, all of the above lead to increased customer satisfaction. By enhancing your customer experience with more services and payout options they prefer, you’ll also be increasing your platform usage and encouraging customer loyalty. 

Increase ROI

As another direct consequence of the above, your ROI should see a boost. If you’re losing less money to fraud, your customers are more satisfied and loyal, your operations are streamlined, and your payments are as seamless and speedy as can be – you’ll receive a higher return on investment. 

Is Visa Direct right for your business?

Visa Direct is a pioneering solution in the money transfer space, so it’s no surprise that it’s the preferred way to send funds to customers for a wide range of businesses. Here’s a list of verticals that commonly use Visa Direct: 

• Banking & finance, e.g. remittances or payroll 
• iGaming, e.g. quick payouts for player wins
• Insurance, e.g. expedited payouts and disbursements
• Gig economy, e.g. immediate payouts for workers after they’ve finished their job
• Government agencies, e.g. tax refunds
• Ride-sharing platforms, e.g. instant payouts once rides are completed 
• Online marketplaces, e.g. quick access to funds for sellers
• Travel companies, e.g. vendor payments in various regions and currencies 

Any business using checks, ACH, or wire transfers to process low-value payments and wants to make it faster, more convenient, and more cost-effective should consider Visa Direct. 

Companies using Visa Direct

Airbnb lets hosts use Visa Direct to access their earnings faster. They benefit from the immediate cash flow Visa Direct provides, as opposed to waiting days to receive their money via other channels such as ACH bank transfer. 

When it comes to enterprises in the gig economy space, Uber, Lyft, and TaskRabbit are among the businesses pioneering the way with Visa Direct at the helm. While we’re all aware of how easy and instantaneous it is to pay for a ride on these apps as consumers, what about how easy and instantaneous it is for drivers to access their income? Due to the use of Visa Direct, drivers can now access their payouts almost straight away. This is a far cry from the days of waiting weeks to receive their balance after passing a minimum earned threshold. 

Numerous other enterprises use Visa Direct as a foundational element of their solutions, including Facebook, Google, Apple, PayPal, Venmo, Square, and Western Union. 

MoneyGram’s Visa Direct journey

MoneyGram, a global leader in payments, partnered with Checkout.com in 2021 to expand its real-time digital P2P payments service using Visa Direct. MoneyGram uses Visa Direct to let its millions of users send money to digital wallets for things like grocery shopping or money transfers. Back in 2019, MoneyGram became the first remittance provider to offer cross-border money transfers from the United States. 

Checkout.com supports MoneyGram in facilitating the transfer of funds via its app and website to Visa debit card holders around the world – in over 25 European countries, to be precise. 

Managing a network of users sending and receiving money daily is an expensive process, especially when you throw compliance into the mix. For MoneyGram, modernizing the process with real-time cross-border transactions not only increases its efficiency in managing remittances but also enhances its customer experience – which in turn helps its bottom line. 

How does Visa Direct work at Checkout.com?

The Visa Direct integration is part of our Unified Payments API, the same API used for all other Checkout.com integrations. 

We support the different Visa Direct use cases that exist, both money transfer and non-money transfer. With both variations, the workflow remains the same. Money transfer payments are used when transferring money to a person, while non-money transfer payments are used for all other remittance purposes (excluding transfers). This includes fund disbursements, wallet transfers, card repayments, and more. 

Want to know more? Don’t hesitate to speak to our team.