The world’s largest payment system Visa mobilises its Indian activities to forward blockchain research. In the near term, it plans to increase the number of staff in its Indian technology centre to 1,000 people.

Special groups working on many aspects of distributed ledger technology will reportedly be created in the centre. In an interview Rajat Taneja, Visa's Global Technology Chief, mentioned that the company's centre in India would play the most important role in blockchain research and development of its potential.

“We are up to 750 people now. We do two-three things here, including Visa developer platforms, global products, etc. This is not an outsourced centre — there is some very cool developer work that is going on here. The aim is to get it up to 1,000 people over the next 12-18 months. Our expectation is that there will be a lot of work that is done around our APIs,"said T. R. Ramachandran, Group Country Manager for India and South Asia at Visa.

In March 2016, the corporation announced its demand for a specialist to occupy the position of a senior software engineer with an implication it will be related to blockchain development. The publication of this job opportunity led many to think that Visa was going to investigate the opportunities offered by the blockchain technology and develop a blockchain network as part of the company’s effort to explore fintech innovations.

For the first time, Visa demonstrated its interest towards distributed ledgers in August 2015 by declaring that it was going to study many aspects of blockchain in its two research labs in US and Singapore. In November 2015, Visa Europe started working on a blockchain proof-of-concept based on simulation of real remittance transactions. Moreover, Visa Inc. was among the major companies that invested $30 million in Chain Inc., a San Francisco-based company that develops banking solutions on blockchain.

The overview of what 2015 has become for the world of finance published by VisaEurope suggests that innovative technologies have closely merged with finance, making blockchain the reality “to live with.”

Anna Lavinskaya