Visa has opened up its payment processing network to IT developers. Now, using the company’s Visa Developer platform, other companies can access key tools to help integrate Visa payment processing directly into their own applications and products.

Essentially, the platform is a web portal for developers offering code, supporting documentation, and access to what Visa hopes will be a growing community of enthusiasts. Visa Developer offers a set of core APIs that enable the integration of things like fund transfers, merchant checkouts, and security technology like tokenization, with more to come in the future.

It’s a significant move in the ongoing story of the digitization of payments, and perhaps a canny business move as the payments processing company faces new challenges on multiple fronts. On the one hand, it could help Visa to compete against rising mPayment rivals such as Apple Pay as merchants take note of alternative means of accepting Visa payments that don’t necessarily require the POS technology needed to process the former’s NFC payments; and on the other hand it could help Visa payment solutions to proliferate across the digital realm as PayPal seeks to take control of that growing area.

Sources: Business Standard, Gizmodo, Visa Developer