Visa extends IoT play (V)

Visa added 13 new partner companies to its Token Service Provider (TSP) program, which allows firms to use Visa credentials and standards to offer tokenized payment offerings in their devices.

The firms include FitPay, Infosys, and others, and focus on areas largely outside of North America, with players in Asia-Pacific and India; Europe; the Middle East and Africa; and Latin America and the Caribbean. The move vastly expands Visa’s TSP program, which launched in October, and ultimately pushes the firm further into the IoT.

Visa’s move comes at a time when connected device payments are on the cusp of the mainstream.

Pushing into seamless payments via the IoT is a smart growth play for Visa. For Visa, seamless and embedded payments carries a clear benefit — by making spending simpler, and more frictionless, users are likely to spend more and more often, which, in turn, leads to higher volume and, thus, revenue gains. That’s beneficial, especially in a fast-growing space. And at the same time, it’s likely a competitive play — Mastercard, Visa’s largest competitor, is rapidly innovating in the IoT as well, and Visa likely wants to keep up — so this could help the company’s brand positioning and loyalty.

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) offers payments companies an opportunity to expand beyond mobile phones, cards, and point-of-sale devices, to a broad and diverse ecosystem of internet-connected devices.

We forecast that there will be 24 billion connected devices installed globally by 2020, up from nearly 7 billion today. And over 5 billion will be consumer connected devices by 2020, representing a massive expansion of touchpoints that could eventually offer payments functionality.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report that dives into the budding industry of connected device payments, providing a rundown of the stakeholders driving innovation in wearables, connected cars, and connected home devices. It also gauges the impact of new payment devices on different payments companies, along with how these devices could shift consumer purchasing behavior.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

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The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of connected device payments.