We’re told that eligible cardholders of participating banks will be able to make payments with Fitbit Pay, Fitbit’s new payment function, when available.

So how does it work?

With Fitbit Pay, Visa and Fitbit are meeting demand amongst the majority of wearable owners who, according to the recent “How We Will Pay” survey* by PYMNTS and Visa, see the opportunity for wearables to improve the way they pay throughout their day with a more secure and seamless cashless payment experience.

Not surprisingly, the continuous rise in mobile connectivity has led to the proliferation of digital payments. And Visa is now in position to make the most of the opportunity at hand.

“Visa continues to focus on delivering the tools and technologies that empower our partners to offer safe, secure and convenient payments to consumers via connected devices,” said Jim McCarthy, executive vice president of innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa Inc. “Partnering with Fitbit on its new Fitbit Pay service is another step forward in the growth of Internet of Things and shows how Visa is enabling companies across the technology industry to help us all move towards a cashless future.”

The post Visa, Fitbit Take Health and Mobile Payments to the Next Level appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Visa today announced that Visa Checkout is sustaining tremendous growth, reaching more than 20 million enrolled accounts.

If you’re not familiar, Visa Checkout enables millions of consumers to pay in just a few clicks on any device around the web with some of the world’s top merchants.

“Visa Checkout continues to simplify the online checkout process for consumers, while helping merchants increase sales and convert items in the cart to completed purchases,” says Sam Shrauger, senior vice president, digital solutions, Visa Inc. “Reaching 20 million enrolled accounts is a huge achievement and further affirms Visa Checkout’s purpose of bringing the trust and security of your Visa card to the evolving digital world.”

As consumer adoption of Visa Checkout grows, so too does interest among brand name merchants in joining the platform. Among the merchants who have recently adopted Visa Checkout to improve their online shopping experience in order to increase conversion rates with additional customers include HSN, Alaska Airlines, Avis Budget, Cole Haan, Emirates Airline, FIFA, Marriott, Sam’s Club and Walmart. These new merchants join a growing list of 300,000 merchants, including Best Buy, Starbucks, Papa John’s and StubHub, among others.

“At HSN, we are focused on developing innovative solutions that result in an unparalleled shopping experience,” said Ryan Ross, EVP of Marketing, Digital Commerce and Creative for HSN. “The Visa Checkout integration helped to attract new customers and drive incremental sales across all our platforms as we continue to lead the future of Boundaryless Retail at HSN.”

The post Mobile Milestone Marked By Visa appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

PRESS RELEASE

SocialCode, a technology and insights company that provides tools and manages digital advertising for leading brands, today announced its Code of Success, a new contractual blueprint for its strategic brand partnerships. Redefining the definition of a brand-partner relationship, it codifies SocialCode’s longstanding principles around service excellence, expertise, transparency and accountability.

Leading brands are choosing to partner with SocialCode, and recent ones include global brands like Heineken, Nestlé Purina and Visa, as well as emerging brands like SolarCity.

“SocialCode’s access to platforms and partnership approach drive measurable results for Purina,” said Rick Spiekermann, Director Digital & Social Marketing, Nestlé Purina. “Their strategic leadership has built a robust learning agenda across our portfolio proven to improve performance.”

“We wanted to work with a partner that understands our core business objectives and how paid social can be leveraged in a strategic and cohesive way to drive those objectives,” said Gedioen Aloula, VP, Head of US Consumer Marketing, Visa. “With SocialCode, we’re building better, more holistic plans that provide rich data and measurable results, allowing us to understand and maximize paid social’s impact on our business.”

“The beer drinking experience is social by design, and our teams are constantly searching for new ways to connect with our consumers in a way that feels authentic and relevant,” said Betsy Paynter, Media Director at HEINEKEN USA. “Having a team plugged into the major media platforms day and night and injecting best practices enables us to be smarter, more nimble and perform at our best.”

“Social data are changing the way brands go to market by delivering audience scale and real-time insight into what is working,” said SocialCode CEO Laura O’Shaughnessy. “In a data-driven world, brand leaders can only succeed if their marketing partnerships are completely transparent in data, method and pricing. These principles have always reflected the way we do business, and now we are elevating them as the foundation of our brand partnerships.”

SocialCode is a leader in providing brands expertise and centralized access to the fastest growing social, mobile and video advertising platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube. These growing platforms reach the most people in the most effective and efficient way, and with the most data to support marketers’ customer relationships. SocialCode provides brands complete access to performance data and insights around planning, audiences, campaigns, performance and more — via software tools, custom reports, data integration and APIs.

ABOUT SOCIALCODE
SocialCode is a technology and insights company that provides tools and manages digital advertising for the world’s leading consumer brands. SocialCode decodes human needs to deliver actionable insights from consumer data on advertising platforms like Facebook®, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. SocialCode is the only major social marketing platform that combines automation with a strategic solutions group. That’s why marketers like Heineken®, Nestlé, Reckitt Benckiser, and Visa trust SocialCode to know what to do now and what to do next. Visit SocialCode.com to learn more.

The post Visa, Nestle, Heineken and Other Leading Brands Plug Into SocialCode for Paid Social, Video and Intelligence appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“Leveraging digital advertising and cross-device connection data from Oracle Data Cloud with aggregated purchase data from Visa Advertising Solutions, merchants can measure consumer response to advertising campaigns run on mobile, display, video and social channels, and use the insights gained to optimize their efforts,” a release shared with MMW reads.

Interestingly, Visa Advertising Solutions can also recommend targeted customer segments for future ad campaigns and timely offers based on past purchase behavior. Purchase data shared with advertisers is always aggregated and de-identified.

“Successful marketing efforts depend on rich data to measure the results and effectiveness of each channel,” said Mike Lemberger, the senior vice president for loyalty and data solutions at Visa Inc. “Combined, Visa and Oracle have unique and powerful assets to help merchants connect the dots between advertising spend and business results – the holy grail of any marketing program.”

That measurement could be the missing link merchants need. In fact, a recent study from WPP research firm Kantar Millward Brown cited lack of effective ROI measurement as a significant impediment to marketers in the digital space. The study revealed that more than 70 percent of marketers say they would increase their spending on digital channels if they could better measure the ROI from those channels.

“Visa Advertising Solutions and Oracle Data Cloud are empowering merchants to find their customers online and measure the results of their ad campaigns on actual sales,” said Eric Roza, senior vice president of the Oracle Data Cloud. “Working together, we can combine Visa Advertising Solutions’ unmatched purchase data and merchant relationships with the Oracle Data Cloud’s data assets and expertise in building and measuring purchase-based audiences. This allows everyone from restaurants to retailers to improve their advertising by establishing a direct link between digital ads and actual sales.”

The post Rounding Up ROI: Visa and Oracle Debut Solutions to Help Merchants Measure Digital Ad Success appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In partnership with start-up ecosystem company, KITE, Visa is posing three real-life business challenges to the start-up community to create innovative solutions that solve Visa business problems and drive the future of commerce.

According to a provided statement, the selected winner of each challenge will receive $50,000 to be used towards the real-world production of their solution and mentorship from Visa marketing, product and technology teams over a year-long period to help bring their solutions to life.

The Visa Everywhere Initiative was created in 2015 to drive strong business outcomes by harnessing the creativity and talent from within the start-up community. Last year’s contest focused on developing new marketing and communications approaches that would engage millennials and drive adoption of Visa Checkout.

“With payment and marketing innovation happening at break-neck speed, Visa is once again asking the start-up community for their best ideas to help move the industry forward,” said Shiv Singh, senior vice president of digital and marketing transformation at Visa. “With Visa’s rich set of APIs and SDKs, we are especially excited to see how our open platform can help fuel additional payment innovation with this year’s challenges.”

The post Start-ups Invited to ‘Dive Into’ the Visa Developer Sandbox appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

To that end, Visa just announced that more merchants are making Visa Checkout available to their online shoppers to help simplify the checkout experience and increase sales.

The latest major merchants to get in on the act? Starbucks, Walgreens, NFL Shop, HSN and Match are among the new merchants taking advantage of Visa Checkout’s ability to deliver seamless digital payments.

Walmart.com will also begin supporting Visa Checkout this year, a provided statement notes.

“Delivering a seamless payment experience for our customers is a priority for us,” said Ryan Records, vice president of Starbucks Global Card, Commerce & Payment. “Integrating Visa Checkout as a way to reload your Starbucks card in our world-class digital platforms is a great way to provide our customers with the reload options that are most convenient and relevant to them.”

The post More Major Merchants Tap Visa Checkout for Mobile Sales appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The program, launching later this fall at select Chevron stations in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, will offer consumers “a simple and more secure way to pay at the pump with a range of mobile payment services.”

Already, an estimated 80 percent of Chevron customers in the U.S. pay for gas at the pump using a credit or debit card.
“Mobile payments are moving into the mainstream in the U.S. because, more and more, consumers see the value of using their personal devices to purchase everyday items like groceries and gas,” said Jim McCarthy, executive vice president of innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa Inc. “Chevron has always focused on giving their customers great experiences by offering convenient ways to pay and being committed to protecting against fraud. For this reason, they are who we want to help us broaden both the reach, and consumer understanding of the many mobile payment options in the market today.”

The post Pumping Up Mobile: Visa and Chevron Bring Mobile Payments to the Pump appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In short, the partners posit, this is a concerted effort to dramatically ramp up global omni commerce.

As a direct result of the pairing, the team pledges to integrate industry leading platforms. Verifone, we’re told, will connect its point of sale gateway to Visa’s CyberSource global merchant payment management platform. The end result? Merchants gain a single platform to protect customer payment data, mitigate fraud, and integrate digital and offline payment systems.

“As consumers shop and pay in multiple channels, merchants are looking to integrate payment systems to facilitate a single view into their customers’ buying behaviors,” said Andre Machicao, senior vice president of CyberSource, a Visa Inc. company. “This announcement is about two industry leaders coming together to create that view for merchants so they can better serve and understand the needs of consumers globally, across all commerce channels, and without sacrificing security.”

The post Visa, Verifone Unite to Ramp Up Global Omni Commerce appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

This week, PayAnywhere may have effectively upped the ante in mobile payments by launching its first ever free touchscreen tablet and stand with built-in credit card reader.

The announcement came at the ETA TRANSACT conference in Las Vegas.

According to a statement provided to MMW, PayAnywhere Storefront offers “a simple pricing model starting at 1.69 percent for swiped credit card transactions, including American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Discover and PayPal all with next-day funding.”

We’re told that the solution also includes data encryption, tokenization and fraud protection, providing both merchants and cardholders with the highest level of security in the industry.

“This is a huge step forward for the SMB market, as it enables independent businesses to better analyze activity and adapt their overall business and marketing strategies accordingly,” said Marc Gardner, founder and CEO of North American Bancard, the parent company of PayAnywhere. “In today’s retail market, small business owners deal with competition from large corporations and online retailers, and therefore need simple payment solutions that also provide them with advanced intelligence and security to ensure they’re maximizing efficiency.”

The post Free Tablet Payment Solution Comes to Retail appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Among the offerings, we’re told, is an option to host Visa payWave-enabled accounts in a secure, virtual cloud.

Visa says its latest move expands the payment provider’s support for mobile payments globally and will give financial institutions greater choice in offering consumers “secure ways to pay with smartphones.”

Visa’s support for cloud-based payments follows the introduction of a new feature in the Android mobile operating system called Host Card Emulation (HCE); HCE allows any NFC application on an Android device to emulate a smart card, letting users wave-to-pay with their smartphones, while permitting financial institutions to host payment accounts in a secure, virtual cloud.

“Our clients and partners around the globe are continuously looking for flexible, cost efficient and secure ways to enable mobile payments,” explains Elizabeth Buse, Executive Vice President of Global Solutions at Visa Inc.

Buse says the Android HCE feature provides Visa with a platform to “evolve the Visa payWave standard, support the development of secure, cloud-based mobile applications, while at the same time offer greater choice to our clients.”

According to data from IDC released earlier this month, 78 percent of smartphones sold in Q4 2013 run on the Android operating system.

The post Visa Raises The Stakes in Mobile Payments appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.