VISA and Crowdpolicy launch the Visa Innovation Program to develop innovative digital payments solutions in Greece
The Visa Innovation Program seeks to become a collaborative platform gathering Greek fintech ecosystem, Visa and its business partners to generate new digital payments solutions in a variety of verticals.
Athens, 14 March 2019 — Visa (NYSE: V) and Crowdpolicy have launched today the Visa Innovation Program in Greece, a partnership aiming at fostering new ways to pay while enhancing digital and mobile commerce experiences for Greek consumers and merchants.
The Visa Innovation Program will operate as a collaborative platform where fintechs and Visa’s business partners will work together for addressing market-wide challenges through tangible propositions. The Program will focus on changing cash behavior to payments with cards under four major verticals: daily expenditures of Greek consumers, incoming tourist spend, transit, Government to Consumer (G2C), Consumer to Government (C2G), Business to Business (B2B) and Peer to Peer (P2P).
The target audience of the program is primarily sizeable, i.e. large and mid-sized, fintechs with a fully or semi-operational solution that addresses market needs fully or at least partially. The Program will also welcome smaller fintechs by catering their needs around accessing Visa-friendly service provider ecosystem and proof of concept (PoC) opportunities.
Program admissions will start in the coming period through online channels. Fintechs enrolling to the program will be provided with access to a wide array of mentors, experts, coaches, and Visa’s global network while receiving support on business planning, value proposition development, programming and many more needs throughout 5 month- long cohorts.
The Program will encourage participants to follow a human-centered design approach and will leverage co-creation and open innovation methodologies in an effort to tailor their existing solutions as per specific needs and challenges of the market. Fintechs will also be encouraged to leverage the Visa Developer Platform (VDP) which provides simplified and user-friendly access to many of Visa’s most in-demand products and services through APIs, allowing anyone to transform great ideas into new digital commerce experiences, while at the same time meeting industry standards.
The first Cohort will be comprised of the following steps:
Enable
the local startup ecosystem to design new digital commerce experiences and engage Crowdpolicy’s growing community of startups with Visa’ s clients, businesses and stakeholders for dynamic interaction to co-create, test solutions and measure reactions.
Accelerate
the teams to build their value proposition with design sprint workshops, mentoring support and inspiring talks. The acceleration process will consist of different stages, ideas, assumptions, test, design, build, measure, learn, rapid prototyping and market validation.
Go live
for the best validated payment solutions to the Greek market and integrate them into Visa’s global payment ecosystem.
The Visa Innovation Program started with a kick-off launch event that took place on 14th of March, where objectives of the Program, its benefits and time plan were presented. The event has been attended by Visa executives from Greece and abroad, business partner executives and the press, as well as a large selection of fintechs.
Αριστερά: J. Grammatikos Deputy Gen. Manager @Piraeus_Bank, A. Tsakanikas Professor @ntua & J.Soldatos, Professor @AthensTechGR, participating at the panel of Visa Innovation Program about “Unlocking the future of payments in the Greek landscape and challenges”.
More information are available on the website of the program at https://crowdpolicy.com/innovation-program/.