Visa has opened its largest innovation centre to date in London, with the aim of hosting partners and clients from across Europe to collaborate on new ways to pay.
The 1,000+ square meter space features live demonstrations including Internet of Things applications, virtual reality and biometrics.
The new centre in London joins a global network of innovation centers and studios located in technology hotspots, including Berlin, Dubai, Miami, San Francisco, Singapore, Sao Paulo and Tel Aviv.
Visitors to the space will be able to check out working demos of connected car and home environments, such as paying for car insurance or placing a grocery order from a refrigerator. With an emphasis on the future of retail, guests will also be able to use virtual reality headsets to pick seats for an upcoming Formula E race and use biometric authentication to pay for tickets.
The launch of the Centre comes as Visa rolls out its new developer Platform across Europe, presenting merchants, financial institutions, technology companies and startups with a menu of APIs, SDKs, and documentation from which to build applications.
At the official opening, Visa also highlighted the expansion of its tokenised payment service for secure payments on mobile phones across Europe. The technology is already supporting mobile payment schemes in 27 countries worldwide, including in France, Ireland, Poland, Switzerland and the UK, with more than 1,300 financial institution partners. The card scheme says that by the end of 2017, the Visa Token Service will have been extended to a further 12 European countries.