Visa Takes VisaNet To Argentina

Visa has launched a new ePayment processing system called VisaNet in Argentina, the company announced on Tuesday (Jan. 29).

The company said the new service will bring new ways to pay and new services to Argentinian cardholders, shopkeepers and banking institutions. The launch will increase Visa’s slice of the domestic transaction pie in the region by 10 percent.

“This is an important milestone for Visa and for Argentina’s electronic payments ecosystem,” said Eduardo Coello, the regional president of Visa for Latin America and the Caribbean. “We are committed to working with our partners to accelerate the adoption of electronic payments. This includes expanding acceptance and launching new innovations that can bring more people into the formal and digital economy in Argentina.”

VisaNet is a worldwide network that can handle 65,000 transaction messages per second, and Visa started processing payments in Argentina on the service in January. That service was formerly handled by Prisma, a company that Visa authorized to handle business.

Earlier this month, Visa launched a global initiative called She’s Next, Empowered by Visa, which seeks to support the advancement of women-owned small businesses around the world through shared research, experience and technologies.

The announcement comes as more than 163 million women have launched businesses across the globe, at a rate that outpaces men.

The payments firm said a key offering through She’s Next will be research. Initial findings of an as-yet unreleased report commissioned by the firm show that, across U.S. small business-owning women, the motivation behind launching a business includes pursuing their passions (48 percent), having financial independence (43 percent) and having flexibility (41 percent).

Also, as many as 73 percent of those surveyed said that it remains rather difficult to gather the funding needed to get a business off the ground. And 61 percent of those queried said they self-funded their businesses.