October 13, 2005

Visa International is trying to make it easier for banks and financial institutions to manage their merchant customers using the Internet with a $31 million payment system upgrade, the company said yesterday.

Now, member banks can use VisaNet to better manage their credit card portfolios and B2B accounts at the individual account level, by simply allowing them to use the full 16-digit card number for identifying an individual credit card holder.

This feature now allows them to target specific offers and rewards to individuals rather than only to groups of customers.

Additionally, Visa gave merchants the ability to tag a medical purchase as qualified for reimbursement under an employee benefits plan.

When employees use a Visa employee benefit debit card to make such purchases, it's automatically validated and logged at the point of sale, so that plan administrators don't need to require paper receipts with reimbursement requests.

The upgrade completes the global rollout of Visa Resolve Online, a dispute resolution system that replaces paper documents with Web access to electronic payment information in order to speed the process of handling disputed charges.

VisaNet is Visa's global payment processing system for Visa-branded consumer credit cards. VisaNet facilitated $1.3 trillion in transactions in 2004.

The October Business Enhancement Release was a regularly scheduled, semi-annual upgrade that took 12 months to complete, Visa said.

"The demands of Visa cardholders never stop changing, so we never stop improving and expanding the technology that is at the core of Visa's value," John Partridge, CEO of Inovant, Visa's IT organization, said in a statement.

Source: Internet News