VisaNet
More info
- Owner
- Visa
- Released
- 1973 (BASE I)
- Type
- Payment network
Visa's private network, which takes authorisation requests from acquirers, routes them to the right issuer and handles clearing afterwards.
It grew out of two systems built by the BankAmericard organisation under Dee Hock. BASE I went live in 1973 and replaced phone calls to an authorisation centre with electronic queries answered in seconds. BASE II followed a year later and replaced paper sales drafts with electronic clearing files. The split survives as the dual-message model: a real-time message that says yes or no, and a batch that actually moves the money.
VisaNet is also where stand-in processing, tokenisation and risk scoring happen, so it is a good deal more than a cable between banks. Europe found out how much it depended on it on 1 June 2018, when a faulty switch in a data centre caused roughly 5.2 million card payments to fail in a single afternoon.