Visa Inc. is financing a team of engineers at its Bengaluru office to research further uses for the blockchain. Visa is looking to improve its payments processes, and it seems that the blockchain technology may hold the key for the Company’s future.
A few months ago, Visa hired a former Google scientist, Min Wang, to lead the research teams from its San Francisco office, and Taneja in a project where they were to work on the blockchain.
The company’s decision to start researching the blockchain technology comes right after banks and other financial institutions developed a sudden interest in the technology. Many of them are said to be already researching and looking at ways to use the technology to make transactions more efficient and secure. Visa is trying to keep up with other developments like Apple Pay, what means that the company is possibly trying to take the lead on mobile payments.
Earlier this month, Visa announced the opening of a new technology development center in Bangalore, India. The company plans this center to have a central role in the company’s efforts to accelerate digital commerce globally.
Rajat Taneja, executive vice-president of technology at Visa Inc. says:
“For now, the focus of this technology innovation centre will be on Visa Checkout and mVisa, but for certain, India will soon have teams that will jointly work with our two research labs in US and Singapore in studying the many aspects of blockchain disrupting technologies”
The center will welcome 1,000 Visa developers. This team’s assignment is to make it easy for application developers to access Visa’s 400 payment products and services in order to build their own payment experiences that can work across a broad range of connected devices.
According to reports made by several companies, blockchain technologies could cut banks’ infrastructural costs by up to $20 billion a year by 2022; many companies are rushing into the technology to be able to cut these costs.
To share knowledge and to speed up the research and implementation process Visa, which outsources its technology work to Infosys and other Indian firms, revealed it was open to joining operations with some of these companies to work on how to build applications using the blockchain technology.
Last month, professors from Palo Alto-based Blockchain University conducted a week-long workshop at Infosys’s Mysuru training facility to help young engineering graduates understand the potential of blockchain. Infosys’s principal technology architect Manjunath Chintamani had earlier taken a two-month course at the university to understand the scope of the technology.
IT vendors need to respond to the demands of their customers and even if the technologies may not bring incremental business as standalone products, IT vendors are investing in these technologies that can help while competing for large outsourcing deals. This is one of the reasons why Visa is so interested in developing new resources using the blockchain technology.
The company’s move comes amidst an increasing interest from financial institutions and banks around the world to look for ways to use the blockchain technology to make transactions more efficient and secure. By using the blockchain, financial institutions are looking to save millions in transactions costs while introducing a whole new set of modern financial services and products.
Many financial institutions are increasingly interested in the blockchain and are ready to start using it. How much do you think this will impact the bitcoin economy? Let us know in the comments below!
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