Visa sees potential in smarter digital services

Visa, the American multinational financial services corporation, sees potential in working and partnering with the government for smarter digital services for citizens and businesses. 

For a country to be ahead in its digitalisation journey, it is important to digitalise consumers and businesses, said Sandeep Ghosh, group country manager of Visa for India and South Asia.

But it is also important to make it possible for the voluminous payments by and to the government to be made digitally, he told journalists during a visit to Dhaka last Wednesday.

Visa provides a broad range of services, which include authorisation, clearing, and settlement services for financial institutions and merchants, according to investopedia.com.

The company does not issue credit or debit cards, rather its clients are the ones that issue the cards. It makes its profits by selling services as a middleman between financial institutions and merchants.

For a country to be ahead in its digitalisation journey, it is important to digitalise consumers and businesses, said Sandeep Ghosh, group country manager of Visa for India and South Asia.

Visa so dominates the market that it has only a handful of big rivals, including Mastercard Inc and American Express Co, as well as digital payments companies like PayPal Holdings Inc.

Providing network services for digital transactions for the past 35 years, Visa currently holds over 70 per cent of the market share in Bangladesh's card business and is in collaborations with 54 banks, according to Sandeep Ghosh.

Transactions through Visa cards rose by 30 per cent last year, he added.

In May, about 72.65 per cent of credit card transactions were through VISA cards, about 16.40 per cent through Mastercard and the remaining through other types of cards, according to Bangladesh Bank data.

The digital services are available in 200 countries through deals with 17,000 banks and financial institutions, he said.

The government's push for digitalisation will help realise Bangladesh's Smart Vision 2041, he said, adding that adoption of digital payments by an emerging country can add up to 3 per cent to its economy.

Visa sees four opportunities to accelerate the country's journey towards a "digital government" and "smart cities", Sandeep Ghosh said.

These include public fund expenditure with more efficient government procurement processes and expense management alongside efficient disbursement of social welfare and subsidies to individuals and small business, he said.

The other two are digitalisation of revenue collection alongside protection of security of payments data and supporting government initiatives such as tourism recovery, urban planning, and economic health measurement through data insights, he added.

On whether Bangladesh Bank's digital card scheme "Taka Pay" will have any impact on the business of global card service providers, Sandeep Ghosh said there was no possibility of it for "unique features in our card services".