Visa to make all local cards payWave-enabled from this October

 From left: Shivakumar Sriraman, Chief Risk Officer, India and South Asia – Visa and Joe Cunningham, Head of Risk, Asia Pacific - Visa

• Top visiting Visa officials highlight payWave-enabled cards and e-commerce as key focus areas for Sri Lanka

By Tilini Rajapaksa

Every new Visa card issued in Sri Lanka from October this year will be payWave-enabled, Visa’s Asia Pacific Head of Risk Joe Cunningham told Mirror Business yesterday.

In an interview after the Joint Payment Card Industry Association of Sri Lanka (PCIASL) and Visa Conference in Colombo, Cunningham discussed Visa’s two key developments in Sri Lanka—its move to gradually replace all existing Visa cards with payWave-enabled ones over the next 3 years and the growth of e-commerce in Sri Lanka.

“The economic impacts of e-commerce are dramatic,” Cunningham said.

“E-commerce is an amazing opportunity for Sri Lankan merchants to grow their businesses—instead of having a market limited to the population of 22 million, they’ll be opening up their market to the entire population of active consumers on the web."

Cunningham also emphasised that Visa’s focus on security and risk management was essential to responsible innovation.

He said the company was introducing new technology to improve the security of the e-commerce system, while also focusing on ensuring cardholders were vigilant when using their cards online while being able to maintain a lot of trust and confidence in the payment system.

He also pointed out that merchants too needed to think about the types of tools they use to protect themselves.

“Risk Management is about protecting the ecosystem of Visa. We have a network of 3.2 billion Visa cards in circulation around the world, 44 million merchants and 17,000 banks in between,” Cunningham said.

“We have a huge obligation to protect the security and integrity of that network.”

Cunningham underscored that global security standards were key to maintaining an internationally secure payment system and Sri Lanka’s integration into this system would be essential to continuing and enhancing security worldwide.