Payments innovation designed to drive greater business impact
Visa's Singapore Innovation Center is at the forefront of developing advanced payment technologies, with a sharp focus on delivering significant business benefits. In its role as a pivotal partner in early product development, the center offers essential insights that influence and inform the early stages of product development, helping to identify potential growth opportunities alongside clients.
The center's strategy for shaping the future of payments encompasses a broad range of business needs and is constantly updated to keep par with the ever evolving payment trends of the region. At launch, the four key highlights include:
- Speed and convenience of biometric payments: Pay-by-palm is the next- generation payment technology that uses unique palm signatures for identity verification, a significant leap from the widely used fingerprint and facial recognition systems of today. Visitors to the innovation center can experience hovering their palm over a reader, linking their unique signature to their payment card for a transaction. While still in early adoption stages, it's already making waves in urban mobility in China and the retail sector in the United States. But it's not just about convenience. Using Gen AI to analyse anonymised biometric and payment data, businesses can also gain valuable insights for personalised recommendations.
- Shop online offline with AR and AI: While many still view augmented reality (AR) as a novelty, this technology has been in use in finance and retail to create immersive shopping experiences that has helped businesses connect with customers. From in-store displays and activations to virtual try-on experiences and navigation, AR and AI can be harnessed together to capture the opportunities that come with the evolution of e-commerce and the growing comfort of consumers with online shopping as well as contactless payments. AR combined with the predictive power of AI, supports a range of use cases, including AR-powered virtual shopping, navigation systems for brick-and-mortar stores, and even virtual fitting rooms, something that can be experienced at the new Visa Singapore Innovation Center.
- Modernising business payments flows for growth: Business payments have some catching up to do. With the help of technology and digitisation, Visa is investing in commercial payments solutions that can help businesses to not just have centralised financial management and reporting, but also analyse real-time data for a better understanding of finances and insights that can lead to growth opportunities. The next transformation will see a mass adoption of embedded finance for business payments, and Visa is driving this change with anchor partnerships like SAP as well as working with fintechs and startups through the Visa Accelerator Program.
- Unlocking competitive advantage with data: Harnessing data is fundamental in today's business landscape, as it drives informed decision- making and strategic planning. Valuable insights into customer behaviour, market trends, and business performance can help businesses optimise their processes, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experiences. The Visa Innovation Center is a sandbox, helping businesses harness data assets to anticipate market changes that can allow them to make proactive adjustments to stay ahead of the competition.
From global to local
The Singapore Innovation Center is part of Visa’s network of eight regional innovation centers worldwide1. It plays a pivotal role in driving regional payments innovation in Asia, addressing the local market needs of Visa’s Asia Pacific clients, and ultimately driving forward the company’s global mission and strategy to deliver innovative, future-proof and secure payments that enable individuals, businesses and economies to thrive.
