Visa to establish technology centre in India

Visa, the global payments technology company, has said it will establish a technology centre in India next year, joining a host of global financial system players who have established technology centres in the country to take advantage of its software and engineering talent. Sources said the centre will be in Bangalore.

Visa said it will hire 2,000 technologists globally, including conversion of contractor positions to full time positions within the company. The company did not say how many of these will be in India, but sources said the majority would likely be here.

Citibank, HSBC, Stanchart, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Fidelity are among those who already have technology and back office support centres in India. For many of them, these centres are their biggest operations outside their headquarters. Goldman Sachs, which has a 5,400-people centre in Bangalore, said on Wednesday that it was establishing a new campus at a cost of $200 million (Rs 1,200 crore). The captive centres are being used partly to develop proprietary technologies that can differentiate them from competition.

The $10-billion Visa, best known for its credit and debit cards, said its positions will be a combination of new roles and existing contractor positions that are being converted to full-time positions. “The combination of these initiatives will help accelerate the shift to electronic payments and drive innovation in mobile and digital platforms,” a company release said.

Uttam Nayak, Visa’s group country manager India and South Asia, said: “India is known around the world as a hub for technology-led innovation. Visa’s decision to open a new technology development centre here further demonstrates our commitment to the region and presents us with an exciting opportunity to grow our internal team from the strong pool of local software engineering talent.”

Teams in the new technology development centre will focus primarily on the development of key application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) helping an expanding group of global partners to more easily access VisaNet when creating new commerce and payment experiences, Visa said.

Rajat Taneja, Visa’s executive vice president of technology, said Visa’s size and scale allows technologists to work on meaningful initiatives that have the ability to change how commerce is conducted for millions of consumers and companies globally. “We are looking for creative, entrepreneurial tech professionals who want to build the next generation of payment products and platforms, will bring engineering insights to our global processing network, and are passionate about partnering with technology and commerce leaders shaping the payments experience,” he said.

Visa said it is also bolstering its technology talent in Austin, Texas and the San Francisco Bay area, and will focus some of the 2,000 positions in support of its two data centres in Ashburn, Virginia, and Denver, Colorado.