What's the big thing for Visa in this region?

There's a lot of opportunity for Visa in this region. There are immense scopes of digitisation in this market. It's one of the fastest growing markets as well. Although there is digitisation going on globally, the problem that still prevails is still pretty fundamental digital challenges. e-Commerce, for an example, is an area that we can work on. As you already know 95% of the e-Commerce transactions are cash on delivery. We should think about it, why is it so high? In our study, we found that trust issue is one of the biggest barriers here. On the merchant side, they believe digital payments are expensive. We looked into the matter and we came up with some unique solution. QR code on delivery is a good example that can ensure you the same level of trust and comfort but you need some sort of digital method to enable that. Now if we look at the broader issues, access to credit cards or other forms of digital instruments, for example, is something we are still working on. Compared to the western world, the adoption rate is pretty low in these regions. We are working with 44 partner banks in this market to increase this adoption.

In a market like Bangladesh where roughly 2 crore people are banking with MFS, how does Visa plans to position itself here?

We actually don't believe that we will be the only solution for digitisation. We work with so many different partners worldwide, and everyone has a role to play. What Visa does fundamentally, is that we enable ecosystems and we typically do it in a four-party model. This fundamental model has been working for us so far, and it's an approach of doing it. Mobile financial services are doing the same thing in another way. The most common misconception about Visa is people thinks we only enable banks and provide cards only. Actually, we enable many non-banking services as well since our main goal is to develop and enable an ecosystem. That's how we have positioned ourselves.

Alternate payment systems are becoming bigger day by day. Is it a threat for Visa?

Interestingly we actually enable all the ecosystems. Android pay, Apple pay, Amazon pay etc are one of our biggest partners. So basically it's not us versus them rather we work hand in hand. It doesn't matter whether you are using a wallet or a IoT device, the funding instrument that enables the transaction is largely tokenised, which is mostly done by us. And it has to be processed that we do on Visanet. Even Paypal's biggest partner across markets is Visa. We are seeing more and more partnership being developed with these players which we often call as wallet-players. They have done a good job across the globe in engaging customers.

Would we be seeing contactless cards soon in Bangladesh?

We believe this is not going to be an overnight thing rather it is going to be a long journey. Contactless is the newest we way of dealing transaction and we are implementing in many countries. We believe this the best technology available across markets. Australia is actually a great example where 92% of the face-to-face transactions are happening today on contactless cards. In Singapore, it's 52%. Even in India, where we started very recently, we have issued more than 6 Million contactless cards with our partner banks. We are expecting the number to go as high as 40-42 million by end of this year.

In Bangladesh, we are working with Bank partners here from the issuance side. In case of the acceptance side, a lot of infrastructure needs to be developed. Every new terminal that we are issuing is contactless enabled. So re-terminalisation needs to happen for the merchant side to move faster so that the adoption of contactless cards becomes faster. We are actively working on both sides here in Bangladesh.

Contactless Cards do come with some security issues. How are you tackling those?

In some ways, these cards are actually safer. You don't need to hand over your card. It's always in your possession. In addition to that, our cards now come with standard EMV chip and since these are crypto-enabled hence each and every transaction generates a unique code. The floor limit is different in different countries. In Australia, it's around AUD 100. For any payment above AUD 100, you have to do the PIN authentication. The floor limit can vary from market to market so you can always ensure the safety of your card.

Some banks have in partnership with Visa has started issuing Biometric verification enabled Visa cards on a test basis. What's the prospect on that?

We support and certify providers that support biometric verification. Biometric is sort of a method of authentication whereas contactless is a way of transacting. As long as the regulator of the market allows us to do so we will allow biometric verification. We already to it for Apple Pay and Android pay.