Visa Research

Visa has developed and is employing a comprehensive strategy to ensure and extend its commerce technology leadership position. This strategy in action includes the formation of Visa Research, aimed at complementing an already substantial investment in technology development with a focus on the scientific foundations of existing, emerging, and future commerce related technologies across broad time horizons. With the establishment of a formal research organization and the associated long-term commitment to technology research, Visa joins the ranks of a small number of industry leaders with both the insight and ability to substantially influence and systemically impact the future.

Artificial Intelligence

Visa's unique position as the world's largest payment network enables us to serve billions of consumers and tens of millions of merchants around the world on a daily basis. Our mission at the Data Analytics team is to unlock the hidden value in these massive high-quality financial data, and develop the world's best commerce intelligence engine to drive innovations in the payment industry and beyond. We conduct applied research in machine learning and related fields to deliver unique insights and capabilities to our partners and clients and help them grow their business. Our research areas include deep learning applications in financial data, supervised and unsupervised representation learning, predictive modeling for fraud and risk management, consumer behavior modeling, recommendation systems, scalable machine learning systems, privacy preserving data analytics, and related fields.

Research projects

• Deep Learning for Commerce – develop predictive models that are essential to all parties in the payment and commerce ecosystem using advanced deep learning technologies over the financial data warehouse at Visa.
• Scalable Machine Learning System – experiment with new generations of distributed systems for machine learning applications to meet the challenge of ever increasing scale and complexity in the data processing pipeline.
• Security Analytics – enable proactive defense in our critical network and system infrastructure through continuous monitoring and real-time anomaly detection using machine learning technologies.

Security

Today's electronic payment ecosystems are possible because of a host of security technologies and capabilities that were developed over a very long and rich history of security research. Extending and enabling new ecosystems, to spur economic growth and improve the quality of life for everyone will require further advances in a number of key areas. We conduct fundamental and applied research in a number of security areas that are critical to Visa, our partners, and the world, including: mobile and distributed systems/cloud computing security, communication protocols and network security, cryptography and cryptanalysis, secure payment technologies, data and application security, malware and program analysis, user and data privacy, assurance and formal methods, security incident and event data analytics, and related fields. 

Research projects

• Advances in Cryptography – aims to build on Visa’s extensive data protection capabilities to achieve policy-enforced full lifecycle cryptographic protection for data in transit, at rest, and during computation, for all computing environments and scenarios Visa employs.
• Distributed and Endpoint Systems Security – enable end-to-end secure computation, data and workload management across the distributed enterprise, between ecosystem partners, and to/from the sea of endpoints and devices
• Secure Data Acquisition and Analysis – balance advancements in cryptography and secure systems for strongest and most efficient context appropriate data acquisition, classification, protection and analysis across the computing spectrum. 

Future of Payments

Our Future of Payments team focuses on emerging technologies that have the potential to reshape commerce. We collaborate with top universities and industry leaders to develop technologies that promise to transform payments in the decades ahead. One area of exploration is advancing the science of Digital Currency technologies and enabling the discovery of real-world payment use cases.

Visa Research Intern Program