Visa Direct Exchange: worldÃs largest private financial payments network
Secure, easy access to funds any time, anywhere, with any device
Problem: Scalability
Visa needed to double the capacity of its transaction networks while maintaining
absolute reliability.
Solution: Reliable transaction platform
Processing an unprecedented volume of transactions with 100% reliability.
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Consumers in today's digital economy are looking for increased flexibility and convenience when paying for goods and services. In addition to this trend, Visa anticipates an explosion in the number of electronic payment transactions in the near future, sparked by the availability of new transaction options, such as mobile commerce, smart cards and person-to-person payments.
To prepare for these movements, Visa set out to implement a network re-architecture in order to future-proof and add enormous scalability to its payments infrastructure.
The re-architecture initiative, called Direct Exchange, builds upon the company's existing transaction platform, a closed proprietary system that was highly advanced when deployed two decades earlier, but not capable of scaling up to meet the demand Visa expected.
Direct Exchange needed to be designed to process an unprecedented volume of transactions with "anytime, anywhere, anyplace" flexibility in order to support Visa's vision of universal commerce, while maintaining Visa's standard of 100 percent reliability. The importance of true 100 percent uptime cannot be overstated. Just five minutes of downtime annually could impact $55 million in transactions. Eight hours of down time, equivalent to 99.9 percent uptime, would mean a potential loss of $5 billion in transactions.