BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 30. Visa continues to support the development of payment technologies based on artificial intelligence in Azerbaijan, Kristina Dorosh, Senior Vice President and Regional Manager of Visa for Ukraine, Georgia, CIS countries, and Southeast Europe, said in an exclusive interview with Trend.
Dorosh noted that the company’s main goal in all countries where it operates, including Azerbaijan, is the development of the digital economy.
“Visa has been present in Azerbaijan for 28 years. Throughout this period, we have worked very actively with banks, fintech companies, major merchants and service providers, and the Central Bank of Azerbaijan to continuously develop digital payments and launch innovative technologies in the market.
Our main goal is to jointly promote the growth of Azerbaijan’s cashless economy. This is important because research shows that as the cashless economy grows, the country’s gross domestic product increases. The transition of funds from cash to non-cash forms leads to higher tax revenues. This, in turn, enables greater allocations for social needs and so on.
We are contributing to the development of the cashless economy in Azerbaijan by introducing new technologies and innovative solutions. Visa was the first company in the country to implement tokenization technology back in 2019. This technology replaces sensitive card data with a unique 16-digit code called a token to ensure security during transactions. By introducing tokenization in Azerbaijan, Visa built the foundation that allowed Apple and Google to launch their digital wallets. Thanks to this, today in Azerbaijan, people can carry out transactions using tokenization, which has helped reduce the level of fraud,” she explained.
Dorosh pointed out that tokenization will now become the next stage for Visa in developing a new level of payment technologies emerging with the advent of artificial intelligence.
“Today, we are working to integrate tokenization with artificial intelligence technologies and add a payment element. This will be the next stage in innovation development, which we will be happy to introduce to the Azerbaijani market in the future,” Dorosh said.
She emphasized that over the past five years, the pace of development in payment technologies has accelerated, and the market has changed more in these five years than in the previous fifty.
“This is happening thanks to new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. Visa is actively developing and using blockchain technology to create solutions that make the payment experience fast, convenient, and transparent. For example, our B2B Connect solution allows legal entities, bank clients, to make cross-border payments within 24 hours. At the same time, the client has complete clarity on where their funds are at any given moment and when their business partner will receive the payment, enabling them to plan their business operations with maximum precision.
Azerbaijan became the first country among 86 countries in the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa region to implement the Visa B2B Connect solution in 2021. Currently, nine banks are connected to it, which is one of the highest figures. We will continue to use blockchain technologies to develop digital payments,” the regional manager said.
Kristina Dorosh noted that Visa is currently actively discussing the use of stablecoins, which are digital currencies pegged to a hard asset, such as the US dollar.
“We are now developing the ability to use stablecoins for international settlements, introducing stablecoin-linked cards, settlements, and programmable money,” she said.
The regional manager also emphasized that supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is one of Visa’s main priorities.
“We have already done a lot together with our partners and banks to enable SMEs to use digital payments. In our view, the potential for using digital payments in these segments is still underestimated.
Small or micro businesses often continue to rely on cash or standard bank transfers, where funds take a considerable time to arrive. Therefore, we are now implementing solutions that allow us to accelerate and digitize these payments. For example, in Kazakhstan, we have already introduced a solution called Request to Pay, based on Visa Direct technology. With this solution, by knowing only your buyer’s phone number, you can send a payment request for your product directly through your banking app. The buyer receives this request in their app and can accept or decline it. Thanks to Visa Direct, the payment will be instantly credited to your business card, which you can open at the bank as an individual entrepreneur. We plan to continue developing such solutions, including bringing them to Azerbaijan,” she said.
Kristina Dorosh emphasized that Visa is actively implementing and applying all the latest technological advancements to enhance the security of its payments.
“We have been using artificial intelligence technologies for 30 years already. Back then, these were machine learning technologies that we used to build risk management and fraud prevention systems. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence, we now have even more opportunities to develop models that can analyze, in real time, the vast data chains we possess, identify potential signs of fraud within this data, and help banks effectively combat cyber threats and block suspicious transactions,” Dorosh said.
She noted that Visa has invested $12 billion over the past five years in developing fraud prevention and risk management tools, and thanks to these tools, fraudulent transactions totaling more than $40 billion have been prevented.