Visa bids farewell to Visa Checkout in U.S. click-to-pay switch

Visa is ready to go all-in on Secure Remote Commerce, the technology behind the card brands' universal "click to pay" button, by starting to phase out the Visa Checkout brand for U.S. merchants on Jan. 21.

The transition comes as Visa has reached a milestone for tokenized digital payments. The card brand has accepted $1 trillion in tokenized payments since introducing the option in 2014 alongside the launch of Apple Pay.

The goal of the SRC implementation is not only to improve security for checkout but also to streamline guest checkout payment process. Rather than create an account for each new merchant or type a 16-digit account number into a browser, shoppers can rely on SRC to permit their card account's issuer to provide secure payment data to merchants.

"Remote commerce isn't just in-app and online. Remote commerce is becoming a bigger and bigger part of commerce," said Mary Kay Bowman, head of global seller solutions at Visa, at a press event in New York. Bowman joined Visa a year ago; she was previously Square's head of payments, and before that worked at Amazon.

"Investing in it now, getting the button flip — as we like to call it — happening now will pay off for other commerce as it develops," Bowman said.

Visa Checkout is used by 350,000 merchants worldwide, and other countries will follow the U.S. in Visa's transition to the SRC button over the course of 2020.

SRC is designed for guest checkouts online, handling the enrollment one time through a card issuer’s app. Thereafter, if a consumer wants to use SRC to pay on a new device, they go through an email authentication process and can choose to trust that device for future payments. After clicking the SRC button at a merchant, the consumer can optionally choose to create an account with that merchant.

Separately, Visa announced a first deployment for another secure payment technology, Tap to Phone, which is launching in the Samsung XCover Pro handset announced on Sunday. Tap to Phone can also be used on wearables and other connected devices to allow small merchants to accept NFC payments without a plug-in dongle.