Visa has launched Visa Intelligent Authorisation, a new capability on the Visa Acceptance Platform that enables acquirers (banks and other financial institutions that process payments for merchants) to modernise their payment processing through a single API connection.
Authorisation is core to how digital payments work: acquirers send real-time authorization requests through card networks to consumer issuing banks, which approve or decline within seconds. However, many legacy authorisation platforms were not designed for the uptime, intelligence, and regulatory flexibility required by modern commerce, leading to lower approval rates, higher operating costs, increased compliance complexity, and slower expansion into new payment experiences, industry verticals, and markets.
Visa Intelligent Authorisation helps address these challenges by providing a modern authorisation capability that can process transactions across major global and local card networks through a single integration.
The solution delivers 99,999% uptime and achieves an average approval rate of 96,3% globally, both industry‑leading benchmarks.
It can be deployed as an acquirer’s primary authorisation processor or as a complementary solution to strengthen resilience – supporting business continuity and recovery, and expanded capabilities alongside existing infrastructure.
Visa Intelligent Authorisation can help acquirers approve more legitimate transactions, manage risk more effectively, and operate more efficiently by delivering real‑time insights and payment updates that reduce friction across the transaction lifecycle and support faster processes such as settlement.
Lineshree Moodley, country manager of Visa South Africa, says: “Commerce is evolving rapidly, and acquirers need authorization infrastructure that can keep up. Yet many transactions still run on legacy systems built for a different era.
“Visa Intelligent Authorisation modernises payment processing through a single API across major global and local card networks, enabling greater reliability today and readiness for what comes next.”
Visa Intelligent Authorisation is available to eligible acquirers as part of the Visa Acceptance Platform.