Visa wakes up to the sound of the internet

If you had to name the pre-eminent internet payments platform, you'd probably say PayPal -- a fact that sends Visa executives into a frenzy. That's why the big V has announced that it's embracing this new-fangled interweb thing that it's just now heard about. The firm has announced the launch of Visa Developer, a way to open up the financial giant's infrastructure to anyone who wants to use it. If you're a company that wants to sell stuff, you can hook your products up to Visa's back end and get all of its skills with very little effort.

Visa's already an investor in Stripe, but clearly wants companies to dump Silicon Valley upstarts like PayPal and Square. The pitch is to show that Visa's greater security, size, history, not to mention that most people already have access to a Visa card, is better than signing your life away to Google. That's not a euphemism, either, since Visa SVP Mark Jamison is already trying to stoke anti-tech company sentiment in his blog post. As far as he's concerned, the "frightful five" of Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft are simply not capable of matching Visa's clout. Sure.