News Flash

  Visa USA says it has finished re-engineering its Integrated Payment authorization platform and is moving processing operations from its San Francisco data center to its new data center in Colorado. The new system handles credit, debit, prepaid and some ATM transactions. "This is the single largest re-engineering initiative ever undertaken by Visa," John Partridge, president and CEO of Inovant LLC, Visa's information-technology division, told analysts and reporters during a conference call. Visa's all-time record is 6,400 transactions per second, though Mike Dreyer, Inovant executive vice president, says Visa has tested 12,000 transactions per second on the new system. Aaron McPherson, research director at the credit advisory service Financial Insights, says he was intrigued by Visa's ability to send more data along with transactions, such as insurance information for health care payments and complete card numbers for "account-level" transactions that could provide instant rewards at the point of sale. "Visa and MasterCard are trying more and more to provide the functionality that a closed-loop network provides, not just faster payments but an architecture that allows them to pass more information over the network more quickly," he says.
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