Visa is touting the success of its digital wallet platform, confirming that 90 U.S. banks now support the V.me digital wallet service.
According to the company, the number of banks behind the platform has doubled since last fall.
Visa also confirmed this week that more than 250 merchants are on board with the V.me service today.
“So there is a lot more coming here, there is a fairly significant pipeline of merchants,” explains Visa CEO Charles Scharf.
Visa’s V.me is markedly progressing in a highly-competitive marketplace. In fact, Visa’s success is particularly noteworthy when you consider the well-established presence of such heavyweights as Square, PayPal, Google, and others.
“Successful tokenization initiatives must also be interoperable and standardized and do several very important things. Number one is they need to deliver value to all stakeholders, that includes issuers, consumers, merchants, acquirers, payment gateways, and everyone involved in the digital commerce platform,” Scharf said during Visa’s recent earnings call.
“It’s got to be standards based, technology agnostic such that a tokenization solution builds on the existing open nature of the payments industry while also aligning with emerging payment innovation systems mobile and digital wallets,” he concluded. “As I said before, it needs to deliver at least the same level as transparency and reliability that exists today. And equally important it needs to address the needs of everyone globally, not just in the United States.”
