In September, The FINANCIAL– Visa announced Vera Platonova as its Senior Vice President and Group Country Manager for Visa CISSE. Platonova, who worked for Visa from 2007-2010 in Ukraine, oversees all Visa operations in seventeen markets throughout Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Southeast Europe and reports to Visa’s Regional President of CEMEA, Andrew Torre. Platonova is a fantastically experienced executive within the fee systems and retail banking sectors. Her seventeen-12 month career includes method development and implementation, enterprise development, and operational management. Platonova joins Visa from MasterCard, in which she changed into the General Manager for the enterprise’s representative office in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Central Asia for more than 8 years.
Georgia is the 2nd u. S. Within the World on the range of contactless transactions.
As a part of Visa CEMEA’s local management team, Platonova may also constitute CISSE within the regional and international Visa network, ensuring that high-quality practice from other markets may be offered to the local payment atmosphere. The FINANCIAL talked with Platonova about Visa’s future visions and development method in Georgia.
Q. What is the development approach of Visa in Georgia and its plans for 2019 mainly?
A. We will genuinely pay a good deal more attention to the popularization of cashless payments with Visa inside the united states of America. We may be focusing on the paintings with key stakeholders, key banks, but no longer only that. We will carry many extra sources into the united states of America. Georgia has been recognized as one of the key nations we need to consciousness on.
So if we are talking about the mass segment, we are thinking about what extra value we will offer to cardholders to aid banks in their efforts to pressure cashless and POS utilization. We may even deliver several premium merchandise and advantages to the marketplace. We wish to make Visa top of the pockets and force utilization of this phase because there are many coins here.
Q. What is Visa’s role in growing payment technologies?
A. As you know, Visa is a global leader of charge technologies, and it’s genuinely tough to hold this management position. Now the complete global is transferring to mobiles, wallets, and devices, which can be turning into new fee methods. We see that the destiny of charge lies now not in the plastic world, but extra within the global of payment revel in. I assume our vicinity is one of the maximum evolved globally, especially in Georgia. Currently, Georgia is the second one used inside the global by the quantity of face-to-face contactless bills at POSes), proper after Australia.
Q. What is Visa’s method to blockchain in Georgia?
A. The blockchain is a complete large and one-of-a-kind subject matter from our core commercial enterprise. In a few markets, it’s a sort of startup fashion that’s every so often followed and now and then not. Therefore, we genuinely don’t construct our approach with full consciousness on blockchain answers because our middle business, the payment sector, is growing too rapidly. We want to observe blockchain in 2-3 years and recognize how it works and how it may be combined with the day enjoy of humans in payments.
Q. What are your best challenges about innovation?
A. I suppose for all these 60 years of Visa’s records. One is the principal task of converting the behavior of cardholders – shifting to cashless bills from cash. It’s huge combat which we were fighting for the previous few a long time. If we take as an instance Georgia, one of the most advanced markets, best round 30% of its general extent goes through cashless bills
Terminals at merchants. The relaxation is coined from ATMs or cashier desks. This transition from cash to cashless is growing yr on the year, but we are still not absolutely there; it is a long manner in advance. We rely a lot on the experience of mobile payments because the whole world shows that cardholders’ behavior adjustments dramatically after they acquire the possibility to pay with the aid of a cellphone.
