Jim Filice, VP and Head of New Payments, Visa Canada spoke to Onside Media, about how Visa Canada is helping small businesses to access their money in real-time with Wave’s Instant Payouts.
What is the importance of Visa Direct and Wave’s Instant Payouts for Small Businesses?
Visa Direct enables several use cases where the speed, reliability and security of moving money is paramount. In this case, the ability to optimize cash flow is critical to the success of small businesses. Wave’s Instant Payouts provides small business owners with immediate access to their money whenever they need it.
In doing away with the wait-time for payment processing, business owners can put that money to good use straight away, whether that is towards further investment in expansion, paying expenses, or to stay afloat in tough times. All in all, we hope instant payouts contribute to businesses thriving in the future.
What are the few major concerns of Small Businesses when they approach banking and how is Visa addressing these?
I wouldn’t want to speak on behalf of small businesses in general, since there is so much variety in the market and each small business is unique in their own way. We are committed to supporting small businesses and helping to identify solutions that can benefit them.
Instant Payouts is a great example of a solution developed to improve the financial flexibility of Canadian business. This past year emphasized that small businesses need the ability to optimize cash flow, so we partnered with Wave to find a solution.
Could you tell us more about “New Payments” at Visa Canada?
My Vice President of New Payments role is new here in Canada. We have a simple and unwavering vision that can be traced back to our beginnings in 1958: To be the best way to pay and be paid for everyone, everywhere. With so much happening in real-time payments and global money movement the focus of our New Payments team will be to deliver on our vision as payments evolve in Canada and around the world.
Besides Wave are there any more partnerships in works with your payment solution?
Solutions that deliver fast, reliable, and secure access to money are equally critical to consumers as they are to small businesses. We recently announced an offering with SkipTheDishes and Stripe. With this new integration to Visa Direct, SkipTheDishes’ independently-contracted couriers who are Visa cardholders will be able to use Stripe’s Instant Payouts to gain real-time[1] access to their earnings, as opposed to waiting days or weeks to receive payouts.
With the constantly evolving payments landscape, and the fast pace of digital evolution, we are always looking for exciting new opportunities to help to improve the lives of Canadians. We have some exciting prospects in the pipeline that we look forward to sharing with the market in due course.
According to you, when you do feel Small businesses will come close to doing businesses at pre-pandemic levels?
COVID-19 has highlighted the need to support Canadian small businesses now more than ever, as most (67 per cent) say that 2020 was a challenge and that their business is still recovering[2]. Owners are saying it will be 10 months on average until their business is back to being operational[3]. It has been particularly challenging for women entrepreneurs, who pre-pandemic, were outpacing men in starting their own businesses[4]. Now they are taking nearly twice as long compared to their male counterparts to recover[5].
Small businesses are the heart of local communities, and they have shown tremendous resilience since the onset of COVID-19 despite an incredibly difficult environment. They have adapted their payments offering to deal with the challenges of the pandemic. Visa’s Back to Business Study: 2021 Women’s Edition revealed that 60 per cent of women-owned Canadian small businesses took measures such as offering contactless payments (30 per cent) and offering alternative payment solutions (12 per cent).
It is our mission to do all we can to support our small business customers at this time and help them get back on their feet – providing innovative solutions like Instant Payouts is one such example.
List a few initiatives taken by Visa to help small businesses during the pandemic? Kindly do add links that small businesses can access if any.
[1] Actual fund availability depends on receiving financial institution and region.
[2] The Visa Back to Business Study: 2021 Women’s Edition
[3] Visa Back to Business Study 2020
[4] She’s Next Visa Study
[5] FreshBooks Study (2020)
This Story is authored by Yugbodh, Onside Media, Toronto, Canada. If you have stories to share kindly email: – info@theonside.com
