San Francisco: Given the importance of the fintech community, and Visa’s longtime commitment to digital payment innovation, Visa has announced the expansion of its popular Fast Track program to the United States in conjunction with a large and growing network of partners.
Fast Track aims to speed up the process of integrating with Visa, to allow nimble start-ups the ability to more easily leverage the reach, capabilities, and security VisaNet, the company’s global payment network, offers, thereby helping fintechs scale more quickly.
Fast Track is made possible with collaborations from leading companies who provide services across the payments spectrum – from card issuance, to push payments integration, to Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance, as well as Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) support. Fast Track is being launched in the US in collaboration with Alloy, BBVA Open Platform, Cross River Bank, Galileo, Green Dot, Marqeta, Netspend (TSYS’ Consumer Segment), Stripe, TabaPay, TSYS, Q2, and Very Good Security. Visa DPS will also support certain partners’ participation in the programme.
“In markets across the world, Visa has successfully rolled out the Fast Track programme, linking arms with fintechs to provide a clear path towards getting to market, leveraging Visa’s scale, security, reach and a strong network of partners,” said Terry Angelos, SVP and Global Head of Fintech, Visa. “By launching Fast Track in the US, we are continuing our support for fintechs across the globe, with the goal of accelerating the growth of digital payments and creating better ways to move money everywhere.”
Last year, venture capital-backed fintechs raised a record $39.6 billion from investors globally, up 120% from the previous year.1. As part of the launch of Fast Track in the US., Visa is working with leading venture capital firms to automatically qualify their portfolio companies into the US. Fast Track programme. Some of these early partners include: Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Ribbit Capital and Trinity Ventures.
Visa’s Fast Track programme, already available in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia Pacific, has successfully helped Visa propel the growth of the fintech industry around the world.
Fast Track is one part of a broader Visa strategy to support fintechs’ growth and development globally. In addition to Fast Track, Visa is consistently engaging with the fintech community through a variety of strategic initiatives and programmes. In the past year alone, Visa has announced partnerships with multiple leading fintech companies, including Currencycloud, Flutterwave, ininal, N26, PayActiv, Rappi, Razer and Remitly.
Fintechs today are looking to change the way money works, solving for friction that senders and receivers of payments experience day-to-day. As one of the world’s original fintechs, Visa is committed to partnering with and supporting the next generation of payment innovators. Today, Visa is focused on helping fintechs bring to market new digital payment experiences across a broad spectrum of verticals including, neo-banking and acceptance, new sectors across push payments like earned wage access, money management and investments, as well as lending.
“Speed is essential for fintech startups, particularly in the early stages. Easier access to the kind of infrastructure provided by Visa’s Fast Track programme will help unlock massive amounts of innovation in the payments ecosystem,” said Schwark Satyavolu, General Partner, Trinity Ventures. “We are looking forward to introducing our companies to Visa as they continue pushing forward digital innovation in the payments landscape.”
“We see many entrepreneurs with big ideas that can add real value and solve problems in the global payments system; the problem can be the difficulty of distribution and connectivity to the essential infrastructure,” said Hans Morris, Managing Partner, Nyca Ventures. “Fast Track solves for this, enabling some of our best companies to start working with Visa right away.”
“Alloy is proud to share Visa’s mission of supporting the next generation of innovative fintech products and services as they get to market faster with the best identity, compliance and payments solutions in the market,” said Laura Spiekerman, Co-Founder and CRO, Alloy.
