Visa Launches New Subscription Management Service
The global subscription market has continued to grow over the past decades as consumers continue to use repeat payments as an easy to manage their products and services.
Today, subscription services span retail, food and entertainment industries, and it's expected to reach a marked US$406bn by 2025 according to Juniper Research.
As consumers adopt more than one subscription service, managing these subscriptions can become quite burdensome – a point of financial services friction that Visa hopes to plug with its new Subscription Manager service.
Subscription Manager: Enhancing convenience for consumers
With its new Subscription Manager service, Visa hopes to deliver an all-in-one service for financial institutions to provide cardholders with a convenient way to track and manage subscriptions via their banking app.
In what Visa calls ‘the era of subscription overload’, consumers are grappling with the complexities of managing multiple subscriptions across a plethora of different web platforms and applications.
Subscription Manager streamlines key elements of recurring payments in one place, enabling cardholders to see where their card details are stored, view recurring payments attributed to their card and stop any unwanted recurring payments.
Visa’s new service comes as the latest edition to Visa’s Digital Enablement product suite – a set of tools and solutions aimed at helping issuers offer better digital experiences for cardholders.
The release comes as the payments issuing giant continues its efforts to increase transparency and get a handle on the subscription economy.
Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore, Global Head of Issuing Solutions at Visa, says: “Managing subscriptions can often feel like a maze, with consumers sometimes feeling trapped in a cycle of confusing charges.
"Our goal is to make this process simpler and ensure cardholders know exactly where their money is going, and when.”
Subscriptions in the broader digital payments landscape
The rising popularity of subscriptions comes as part of consumers’ growing demand for more secure digital payments services. As expectations grow, issuers like Visa need to keep pace with consumer demand.
Indeed, Visa has found that 63% of consumers surveyed are comfortable living in a future market that relies entirely on digital money – one propelled by the rapid introduction of digital financial tools and services.
Visa has also found half of consumers surveyed have adopted the use of mobile wallets in the past year alone, with increased adoption expected in the coming months. The issuer has recently invested US$100m in generative AI innovation for payments to foster greater digital payments uptake for the future, while its collaboration with Western Union has helped proliferate cross-border transactions.
Of course, this means the usability and adoption of Subscription Manager is set to be high.
Subscription Manager is currently in pilot in select regions, with a full rollout expected in due course.
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