VISA Chooses India for Blockchain Tech Development

By Samburaj Das for CCN.LA

The world’s largest payments network is expanding its new technology center in India to focus on blockchain technology development for its global endeavors.

VISA is going gung-ho on the blockchain technology and is setting up the infrastructure and personnel to push blockchain development, out of a development center in Bangalore, India.

The payments giant had 400 engineers at the technology innovation lab at the time of launch in August 2015. At the time, Rajat Taneja, executive vice president for Technology at VISA revealed that the Indian center will jointly work with existing research labs in Singapore and the United States. The Bangalore-based center will, specifically, play a “key role” with blockchain, Taneja stated.

Now, TR Ramachandran, country manager of India and South Asia at VISA has revealed plans for increasing the number of engineers and developers at the blockchain-focused technology center.

In an interview with the Economic Times, he stated:

We are up to 750 people now. We do two-three things here, including VISA developer platforms, global products, etc. This is not an outsourced center – there is some very cool developer work that is going on here. The aim is to get it up to 1,000 people over the next 12-18 months.

VISA has made notable efforts in understanding, researching and developing distributed ledger technology, pioneered by the bitcoin blockchain. In an official blog post toward the end of 2015, VISA Europe deemed ‘Fintech’ as the industry where “everyone wants to be’, whilst summing up 2015 as a year for payments.

Bitcoin and blockchain technology, it said, is “something the industry has to live with,” adding, “it is no longer a choice anymore.”

Earlier this year, VISA put up a job posting that sought a senior software engineer to be a part of its research team. The objective? To help develop a “secure and scalable blockchain”, the posting revealed.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

First appeared at Cryptocoinsnews.com