Visa’s new 100,000 square feet technology space is part of the Bagamne World Technology Center, a 70-acre campus in the heart of India’s IT corridor. The facility is a combination of office and collaboration spaces that will be the home for 1,000 Visa developers.

The team is tasked with making it easy for application developers to access Visa’s 400 payment products and services in order to build their own payment apps that can work across a broad range of connected devices.

“For the past 50 years, access to Visa’s technology environment was tightly controlled and available only to developers at financial institutions and merchants," says Rajat Taneja, EVP of technology at Visa Inc. “Today, as commerce shifts to digital environments where consumers can make secure purchases using mobile devices, it is critical that we open up Visa’s network and make it easier for developers globally to access our payment platform - making secure Visa payments a standard feature of mobile applications.”

The Bangalore centre is one of several facilities planned by Visa in the US and Asia as part of a global strategy to transform company’s global processing network into an open commerce platform.

As part of the opening ceremonies, Visa announced mVisa, a new mobile payment service that will be tested this summer with merchants across the Bangalore region and with customers of Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and State Bank of India.

Consumers will be able to download the mVisa application to their smart or feature phone and securely link their debit, credit or prepaid cards, enabling consumers to pay for purchases in stores and online by initiating a transfer of funds from their account to the merchant’s account. Additionally, mVisa users will be able to pay bills and send funds to other Visa account holders.

The company plans to roll it out to 20,000 merchants in the greater Bangalore region in September.