When you devise an idea for your product or service, you might not be sure where to begin, how much the use of Visa capabilities might cost, and what steps are involved to build and deploy. That’s where the Visa Developer Platform can help – we aren’t just a portal, our goal is to partner with you on this journey to make integration with our APIs as effortless as possible.
Exploration Phase
The first step of your journey, as in most cases, will be Exploration. At this point, you might be wondering if Visa’s APIs are the right solutions for your business opportunity. Most clients browse our Developer Portal (https://developer.visa.com) to gain an initial broad understanding of our capabilities. The portal not only provides an overview of the APIs and their target use cases (https://developer.visa.com/use-cases), but also in-depth documentation about the API functions and parameters. In addition, be sure to visit our Community Portal (https://community.developer.visa.com) to continue learning through our Blogs, Webinars, and Forums.
If you’re eager to start developing your project at this point, you can begin implementation in Sandbox right away for most of our capabilities. If you are associated with a client institution that already has a Visa Account Executive/Manager, feel free to reach out to them as well. When you do, a member of our team can either validate your understanding or engage one-on-one to learn more about your business and proposed solution. We can then recommend best practices, highlight any general nuances that you might have missed with respect to API integration, discuss pricing/contractual terms and develop a rough timeline for deployment to production.
Ready to Test
Once you’re ready to start implementing and testing your code, you can access the Visa Developer Sandbox environment by creating a project through our web portal (https://developer.visa.com/portal/auth/register). This access is provided to you free of charge. Just sign up and go!
As a first step, add the eligible APIs that meet your needs into your project. Some of our APIs are restricted for product readiness/security/compliance purposes; if you wish to integrate these into your project, simply email us and we will assess whether we can provide access. Our Getting Started Developer Tutorials (https://community.developer.visa.com/t5/Developer-Tools/bg-p/DeveloperTools/label-name/tutorials) are a great resource to guide you through this account creation process.
Submit to Go Live
As you conclude your testing in the Sandbox environment, you will have to submit a Go Live Request (once again, through our Portal; tutorial available at the link above) to promote your project to our Certification, and ultimately Production, environments. At this point, a member of our Client Engagement team will work with you to draft and execute a VDP API Agreement outlining our terms and pricing. We will also verify whether your implementation meets the basic Visa compliance requirements (PCI DSS, etc.), as needed, for the relevant aspects of your particular solution. This commercialization process is described at length here: https://developer.visa.com/pages/working-with-visa-apis/visa-developer-commercialization.
Certification Process
After the VDP API Agreement is in place, one of our Implementation Managers will assist you through the Certification process. Certification credentials are generally granted upon submission of the CSR file, and our Global Testing Team may execute pre-defined test cases with you over the phone. Our APIs vary widely in their complexity; and hence, each product team has defined their own checklist to help identify production readiness with respect to the integration with Visa capabilities. Once testing and checklist tasks have been successfully completed, we will deploy the production configuration for your application and provide you the production credentials for going live.
In Production!
Congratulations! Your solution is now in production and available for your customers. While the rollout and use of the capabilities depend on you, Visa may support a pilot period (before we start billing you) for certain capabilities, to help you assess whether your solution is providing the expected value. Of course, going live does not mean the end of our engagement, and we’re here to support you should issues arise in production. Our Operational Support teams proactively monitor our Gateway around the clock to help prevent any down time. This support is provided at no additional cost to you.
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post and hope that we’ve answered some of your questions, but we know that you’re bound to have more. Feel free to reach out to us through any of the channels mentioned above, and let’s keep this conversation going!
