NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Visa this week announced a new list of 13 “partner” companies to help it distribute and manage Visa-generated tokens, which the network giant is promoting for use in what it hopes will be large-scale rollouts of Internet of Things devices that can do payments.
There are few IoT devices used for payments now, however, outside of high-end smartwatches like the Apple Watch. And most of its new partner companies are small wallet technology providers targeting payments from smartphones, not yet IoT devices. In addition, few have actually integrated yet to the Visa Token Service, or VTS, platform.
The additions to Visa’s token service provider, or TSP, program, bring to 16 the number of companies that Visa hopes to qualify as vendors to help issuers and wallet providers use its tokens. The vendors could provision and provide lifecycle management, among other tasks, for the tokens in mobile wallets, either working for issuers or for wallet providers. In the case of bank wallets, the issuers and wallet providers would be one and the same.