Visa said this week that it has opened up its payments processing platform to developers.

Dubbed Visa Developer, the program is based on a series of APIs that span Visa's services.

At launch, Visa Developer has APIs to access 150 different Visa systems, ranging from Visa Checkout and Visa Direct, to Visa's location and tokenization services.

The announcement is a signifiant move for Visa. For one, this marks the first time Visa has made its processing technology broadly available to third parties.

What's more, Visa operates operates the world's largest payments processing network, and by opening it up to third party developers, the company is betting that it can become a more ubiquitous alternative in the race for online and mobile payments.

Although somewhat late to game, San Francisco-based Visa brings with it an enormous amount of customers and an extensive network of partners, including thousands of banks and other financial institutions. For developers building an app and weighting processing options, Visa just became a lot more enticing.

"From Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon to Facebook and Microsoft... the benefits of network effects mean that scale and standardized instant access to distribution wins," Visa's SVP of Global New Product Mark Jamison wrote in a blog post.

"No other company in this space has yet to deliver the customer density, global reach and scale that will be available through Visa's open platform."

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