Visa Developer Community

    {From the Dev Community}   How a Fintech Builds Partnerships - Tips for Fintechs by Fintech CEO       Learn why Fintech Co-Founder and CEO at Pungle Paul Birkness says collaboration, cooperation and partnership are fundamentals for a startup’s success and growth in the payments ecosystem.   Read Paul's Guest Blog here             Visa Dev Spotlight: Race Vanderdecken      July’s user of the month goes to Race Vanderdecken (@Vanderdecken) who is building an app that leverages Visa Direct APIs to anonymously send digital tips. Learn about his current venture and give him some love with a kudo.   Get to know Race here.             {What's Trending}     Most Viewed Question     While working with the Visa Checkout button, @mobiledesigner  asked if they can design their own version of the "Visa Checkout" button to fit their app look, tone and feel.   Get the answer here           Featured Dev Topic     Still having issues with Two-way SSL? We’re getting a lot of folks finding help from this forum thread with more resources to help.   Get the details here.     ... View more

This month, our spotlight goes to  @Vanderdecken  who  is currently building an app that anonymously sends tips. Learn more about him and congratulate him as our top user with a kudo below!       Q: Tell us a little bit about who you are, where are you from and what are you currently working on?   I am from several places. I have lived on three continents and worked on a fourth. Right now, I live in Western North Carolina. I am mostly a software architect who creates and invents new types of systems. That differs from most software system architects who just take existing parts and puts them together.     I am currently working on TipiT, which is an app used to anonymously send tips using QR Codes, M-Visa, and Visa Direct payments.   Q: What interested you in Visa Developer?   I was searching for a way to familiarize myself with the credit card processing world. My app needs to use systems such as ACH, Visa Direct or M-Visa to be workable. Now I am researching new ways to use payment processors to do micropayments.   Q: If you were an API, what would you be? Why? J   I would be an advice API about manners and being a gentleman while dating. Think of something that responds to queries with how to correctly act as a gentleman for any occasion. It is one of those APIs/Books I have been trying to write for twenty years.   Q: What do you love most about coding?   The storytelling parts. For me writing code is just like writing a movie screenplay in that there are several acts and subplots, introductions, setups, journeys, conflict resolution and many actors that come together to make great code.   Q: What was the first thing you built with code?   I used a Commodore 64 to create patterns for sweaters as a student. Professionally I wrote Ethernet  network drivers for Windows 1.1   Q: What’s the most exciting thing about being a developer in the payments industry for you?   Being able to create something that will change people’s/ customer’s lives in a good way. Our TipiT app is about being able to anonymously tip people.   Q: Any tips for developers exploring payments?   Same advice I give all developers, keep a proper engineering journal in a bound notebook. The notebook won’t crash, and it will come in handy when you are asked by your boss if there is anything you have been working on that might be patentable. Being able to show your daily work on paper beats trying to remember what you did six months ago come review time. My notebooks date back to the 1980s.   Q: What has it been like working with Visa Developer so far? What have you learned?   For me it has been a tough road. My coding skills are in older languages so having to learn and understand new ones is driving me a bit crazy. Personally, I would rather just find someone else to write the interface code while I work on the systems levels.   Q: Anything else to add?   I have a degree in Brewing, Distillation and Fermentation. I took some time off from programming to see what the world of manufacturing was all about. But then people kept asking me to program and not so much make beer.   ---- Every month we will feature Visa Dev Community members who are active on our forums and blogs. Want to be featured? Start by giving this blog a kudo or comment. The more you are active, the better your chances of being the next user of the month!  ... View more

This month, our spotlight goes to @MikeyB who  is currently bringing offline payment solutions to the aviation retail industry. Learn about his current venture and give him some love with a kudo below!   Q: Tell us a little bit about who you are, where are you from and what are you currently working on?   Originally from St Albans, Hertfordshire, England but have traveled the globe working for the past er… ‘many’ years.  My background is in electronic engineering but over time that has morphed through telecoms, into digital systems and finally software.  I spent 8 years involved in developing 3G networks, some of my work is just coming to life now, the lead times and integration testing has taken over 10 yrs to complete - and still we haven’t seen the seamless hand-off of mobile voice calls to WiFi voice.  My current venture, flightPOS, is bringing offline payment solutions to the aviation retail industry.  If you ever fly and need to pay for WiFi based content when there is no internet option and no seat back screens there’s a good chance it will be my software powering the payments   Q: What interested you in Visa Developer?   Visa developer provides the opportunity to have access to a community of experts just when  started to need a few questions answered as I finalize my product, due to launch in the coming weeks.   Q: If you were an API, what would you be? Why? 🙂     I think would be an API accessing F1 data.  I’d love to analyse the telemetry data coming back from Vettel and Hamilton.  I might even POST some brake behavior adjustments so Vettel goes off track at a chicane just in front of Hamilton.   Q: What do you love most about coding?   The relentless way code evolves, I remember the first mention of Java I came across over 20 years ago, look at it now. Really grown up and there’s still life in the old dog! The magic when it all comes together. The bugs testers find that make you go “What?!?! Really?? How could I be so stupid!” The tools that try to make coding so simple Stackoverflow of course   Q: What was the first thing you built with code?   My goodness…..Zilog Z80 8 bit processor, 4 bit bus, I wrote some assembly language maths ‘thing’, can’t quite recall exactly what but it was not easy. We had to work hard to do simple things back then. Kids of today don’t know they’re born!   Q: What’s the most exciting thing about being a developer in the payments industry for you?   Coming down the track is PCI4.0 and PSD2 SCA. Both of these I expect to make changes to the way I work. PCI 3 has had its day, still stuck in the server room and not really up to it for many of today’s cloud based systems.  I expect the changes to cause a world of pain for me initially as requirements that are currently classed as not applicable will be adjusted for today's environments and will become very applicable ☹ Trying to use Atlassian Jira with Confluence as a tool to manage compliance is also exciting – I’ve put in so many hours setting it up that I am determined it will be the best way to work.   Q: Any tips for developers exploring payments?   Yes – when creating validation for cardholder data input screens watch out for iOS having FIVE types of apostrophe to catch. Names like O’Connor might get rejected in error.  Caused me no end of grief.   Q: What has it been like working with Visa Developer so far? What have you learned?   I would say responsive. Very responsive. It’s good to know that you are not just firing questions off into a black hole.   Q: Anything else to add?   Don’t stop learning, it keeps you young and also make time away from the keyboard to have a real life interacting with real humans 😊       Every month we will feature Visa Dev Community members who are active on our forums and blogs. Want to be featured? Start by giving this blog a kudo or comment. The more you are active, the better your chances of being the next user of the month!      ... View more

  {From the Dev Community}   Tutorials: How to get started and generate a CSR File using Java Keytool     Did you know we have some tutorials available to get you started and moving along with your project development. Check them out here. not seeing the topic you want? Let us know what videos you want to see.    Watch them here         Visa Dev Spotlight: Mike Boote      June's user of the month goes to Mike Boote (@MikeyB)  who is currently bringing offline payment solutions to the aviation retail industry. Learn about his current venture and give him some love with a kudo.    Get to know Mike here.              {What's Trending}    Most Viewed Question     When trying to validate the name field when payments are being made be credit card @MikeyB asked what the REGEX string should be for this?    Check out the solution           Featured Dev Topic     Did Visa Direct Watch List Screening API get removed from your sandbox project?  @stosh  noticed this happened to their project too.    Find out why and what you can do to add it back           Your actions for June:   Want a water bottle? We are planning a webinar and want to know what topic to cover. Comment on this thread here. The first 10 to respond will get a special edition Visa Dev water bottle. Stay hydrated this summer, submit topics here for a chance to win one here. ... View more

We are working on hosting some webinars for you all. What topics would you like us to cover? Comment below.        ... View more

When a natural disaster hits, ensuring small businesses recover is critical to rebuilding impacted areas overall. Small Businesses face a wide variety of challenges as they recover, from restoring their revenue stream, gaining access to funds for recovery, paying employees or finding suppliers still in operation.   In order to help business owners, developers got to work building concepts to help mom and pop shops prepare and recover using APIs from Visa Developer and the U.S Government at the Small Business Hackathon in DC.   One team came out on top for best use of Visa APIs with the app Disaster Recovery Score. The team of four got inspired with the app idea while doing their own research of what it takes for small businesses to recover…their discovery? The amount of resources and information out there was overwhelming…there has to be an app to help reduce the noise and get small businesses back up and running, quickly. Enter Disaster Recovery Score.     Here’s more from @clint_guin, @Bahareh_Akhtar, @ccrookes and @Harish_kanuri  on what their winning solution is all about, how they built it and what’s next.     Q: What brought you to the event? How did you hear about the hackathon?   A: Bahar and I had been to several hackathons in the past including a Capital One hackathon last year that was hosted by BeMyApp. Bahar got an email from BeMyApp about the Small Business Week Hackathon and shared it with me and her co-workers Charles and Harish. We saw it as a great opportunity to work together as a team to help small businesses.   Q: What were your thoughts about the challenge statement?   A: We were excited about the challenge statement; we were given a chance to help small businesses when they need it most. Small businesses are the engine of the economy and natural disasters are becoming more and more common and impacting more and more businesses so it was easy to get motivated to start thinking about solutions to help them.   Q: How did you come up with your solution?   A: We started looking at all the information we could find about the hackathon and soon found out who would be judging the hackathon. We tried to come up with ideas that would impress all of the judges and at the same time help as many small businesses as possible. We soon started to focus on Janice Jucker, she was the owner of Three Brothers Bakery in Houston, TX and had been impacted by several Hurricanes including Hurricane Harvey in 2017.   Janice had received the 2018 Phoenix Award for Outstanding Small Business Disaster Recovery and to us that meant she was one of the best examples of how to recover from a natural disaster. We wanted to help small business owners prepare for natural disasters as well as she did. We then started looking through some of the disaster recovery resources and realized that there was an overwhelming amount of information available and that it would be hard to feel confident that you had done everything to prepare to recover after a natural disaster.   We settled on the idea of a score that would help small businesses understand how prepared they were to recover from a natural disaster and what areas they could work on to become better prepared. When we got to the hackathon we were able to talk directly with Janice to understand what were the most important parts of preparation we should take in account to calculate a disaster recovery score for a small business.   Q: What is the point of friction you wanted to address? How has other solution on the market today fallen short to address this issue?   A: The main point of friction was that many small businesses have never been through a natural disaster and don’t know what they will need to do when a natural disaster happens. The information available today is great but it's hard to be sure that you haven’t missed something that will be really important. Having all the steps needed to prepare for a natural disaster laid out in one app provides small businesses a clear plan to prepare for a natural disaster. Big companies have this know-how, if a big box store is hit by a natural disaster, Corporate headquarters knows exactly how to get that branch back up and running. We wanted to make a solution that would provide small businesses with this same ability.   Q: What are some of the details behind your app’s technology? What exactly is this technology, and how is it the best fit to solve the problems you’re solving?   A: The Disaster Recovery Score app is a Progressive Web App (PWA) built with Vue.js. PWAs are the cutting edge of app development and are extremely versatile. This means that there is no limit to how users can access the Disaster Recovery Score app, it can be easily packaged and published to both the App Store and Google Play. It can also be accessed from any computer with a web browser.   All of this is possible from a single codebase that provides users with a consistent user experience regardless of what device they’re using. The app is deployed on Firebase Hosting and user data is stored in Firebase Firestore. To leverage Visa APIs and store user documents, we implemented several Java microservices and deployed them on Google Cloud Kubernetes. Documents uploaded to the app’s digital vault are securely stored in Google Cloud Storage.   All of these technologies come together to make Disaster Recovery Score available to all small businesses and able to scale, even if every small in the US used it to prepare for natural disasters.   Q: Which Visa APIs did you use and how did it enhance your solution?   A: Disaster Recovery Score uses both the Merchant Locator API and the Authorize.net Payment API.   One of the subscores used to calculate a business's Disaster Recovery Score is their access to operational suppliers score. This subscore is determined by how many supplier’s they have entered into the app that they intend to use after a natural disaster. Usually a small business will buy supplies from a neighboring supplier but after a natural disaster it’s possible that their usual neighboring supplier is also impacted by the natural disaster and is unable to help. By using the Visa Merchant Locator API, we were able to provide the user with the ability to search for suppliers that would probably be outside of the impacted area of the natural disaster. The user specifies a radius and the app returns merchants that are outside of that radius. The user can then add them to their operational suppliers list. This way the small business will already know what suppliers they can use when they need supplies after a natural disaster.    Another subscore is the small business’s ability to recover revenue flow. It’s possible that a small business may be ready to do business after a natural disaster but internet connectivity may be down or the business’s point of sale is damaged. By using the Authorize.net Payment API, The Disaster Recovery Score app provides the small business with an emergency point of sale so that they can accept payments with only a mobile device and cell signal.     Q: What is next for Disaster Recovery Score? And/or How would you build out the features more?   A: When we spoke to Janice at the hackathon she said that one of the biggest roadblocks to recovery was securing the funds needed to buy the things needed to get back in business. All of the replacement equipment and supplies had to be purchased on lines of credit, while all of the cash they had saved up went to paying employees, because employees can only be paid with cash. Of course they had insurance and they had applied for disaster recovery loans from the SBA, but those funds would take at least a month to show up. Each new line of credit she established brought her credit score down which made it harder to open other lines of credit. To creditors, all of this extra spending looks like they’re going on a shopping spree when in reality it’s the only way to get back in business.   Using the Disaster Recovery Score app and working through all of the subscores could be part of an application process for a new type of Visa card called the “The Visa Disaster Recovery Card”. Visa would review and verify the information entered into the app the same way they review and verify information in other credit card applications. A small business’s traditional credit score and Disaster Recovery Score could be used to determine the business’s credit line. The credit line would then be activated when a natural disaster is declared in the small business’s area and provide them with the liquidity to buy what they need immediately after disaster strikes.         The team won Best Use of Visa APIs and 2nd Place Overall, going home with $20K in cash prizes. Congrats!    What do you think about the project? Comment below.  ... View more

This month, our spotlight goes to @banregiolabs which isn't just one user, but a team of devs working at BanregioLabs, in Mexico. Congrats for being May's Visa Dev User of Month. Special shout out to Arturo Ivan Martinez and Eduardo Salaza Gutierrez.    Q. Tell us a little bit about who you are, where are you from and what are you currently working on? A. We are Banregiolabs, the innovation team from Banregio, a financial institution on México. We are working with eCommerce payment gateways and POS solutions, to mention some projects.   Q. If you were an API, what would you be? Why? A. Maybe we would be the Visa Card Eligibility. Because, we want to make smarter offers to our customers.   Q. What do you love most about coding? A. The possibility to create solutions to complex problems and make better experience for people.   Q. What was the first thing you built with code? A. Simplicity, lean, success.   Q. What’s the most exciting thing about being a developer in the payments industry for you? A. Create better solutions to the actual needs, like protect customers in prevention of fraud, digital payments, and offers and promotions.   Q. Any tips for developers? A. Be aware of new frameworks, new services and make team with brilliant people.   Q. What brought you to the Visa Developer Center for the first time? A. Explore the services to our cardholders.   Q. Did you leave the Visa Dev Community feeling like less of a Newbie, and if so, why? What did you learn? A. We learned about the use of a pair of APIs.   Q. How was your experience with the Visa APIs? A. At this time, good, we need to solve some points to make a final release of our projects.     Every month we will feature Visa Dev Community members who are active on our forums and blogs. Want to be featured? Start by giving this blog a kudo or comment. The more you are active, the better your chances of being the next user of the month!  ... View more

We are updating one of our Visa Developer Center APIs – Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry.    If you have one or more projects created with this API, please be aware  we are changing its authentication method. Starting in late May, the API's authentication credentials will be changed from Two-Way SSL to X-Pay token.     Project information   If your project includes ONLY Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry API with Two-Way SSL authentication method, then you will see credentials for only X-Pay token post this change. If your project includes Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry API and any other APIs with Two-Way SSL authentication method, then you will see credentials for both X-Pay token and Two-way SSL post this change. If your project includes Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry API and any other APIs with X-Pay token authentication method, then you will see credentials for only X-Pay token post this change.   This should not have any impact or change on the Outbound Configuration and Certificates which is used for Outbound calls (https://developer.visa.com/pages/working-with-visa-apis/outbound-configuration).   We hope this is an exciting change for you since we feel this will reduce the friction you have when trying to push your projects live from sandbox through to certification and production.   What is needed of you?   Nothing. The change will be reflected on your project automatically. You can log into your Visa Developer Center account and visit your project on the Visa Developer dashboard.   If you do not have this API in any projects disregard this update.  If there are any questions, reply below or please reach out to developer@visa.com. ... View more