ICICI Bank first to offer Visa eMarketplace

BANGALORE: India is the first in the region to launch the online procurement and payment service. Visa, ICICI Bank and Elcom Systems Ltd have announced the launch of the Visa eMarketplace, an online portal that connects sellers and buyers of commercial goods and services. 

Visa eMarketplace makes it possible for businesses in India to conduct the entire procurement and payment transaction electronically and efficiently over the internet using a Visa Purchasing Card.  This is the first Visa eMarketplace service to be launched in Asia Pacific.

Santanu Mukherjee, country manager, South Asia, Visa International, said, “Visa eMarketplace is designed to be an efficient, seamless and transparent procurement system for the commercial and government sectors.  It helps to eliminate the need for paper-based purchase orders and approvals. 

Essentially, eMarketplace reduces manual effort as the process of payment and management of costs is automated. We are proud to partner with ICICI Bank and Elcom to provide this service.”

Visa eMarketplace offers a secure online option that builds on the existing Visa Purchasing Card platform.  Sellers can give buyers easy access to their product catalogues while buyers can have better understanding and management of their inventories, for example, by providing purchase analysis to help in the planning of expenses.  The records provided also help ensure detailed tracking for audit purposes.  

Core to Visa eMarketplace is the Visa Purchasing Card which is meant for low-value, high-volume purchase of non-personal goods and services.

Sachin Khandelwal, Head – Cards Product Group, ICICI Bank said, “In keeping with our tradition of innovation, ICICI Bank is the first bank in the Asia Pacific region to launch Visa eMarketplace for ICICI Bank’s Purchase Card customers.

"Over the last decade, the credit card industry was driven primarily by consumer cards. Going forward, ICICI Bank sees significant growth coming from the so far untapped and still nascent Commercial Cards products like Purchase Card, Corporate Card and Distribution Card. ICICI Bank Purchase Card and Visa eMarketplace are designed to offer corporates and government organizations a robust, transparent, more economical and secure procure-to-pay solution.

Corporates and government departments can use Visa eMarketplace to make purchases online from their suppliers and use ICICI Bank Purchase Card to make payment. ICICI Bank believes the Visa eMarketplace platform will add significant value to vendor payment processes of corporates and government departments. The competitive prices that vendors will offer here would be very beneficial to most large and small corporates for such purchases.”

William Lock, Chairman, Elcom Systems Ltd added, “The combination of the Visa payment card with Elcom’s world-class eProcurement Platform improves the procurement process in any organization. Our technology powers some of the most successful eProcurement implementations in the world. Elcom has a proven track record of delivering innovative and flexible solutions and we look forward to working with Visa on this new and exciting development.”

Visa eMarketplace is an eProcurement service that does not require participating organizations to invest in hardware, software or continuous upgrades. Visa eMarketplace is a secure system that uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) data encryption to help ensure that information exchanged within Visa eMarketplace is encrypted to prevent unauthorized disclosure.