Despite being “everywhere you want to be,” most Canadians don’t understand what Visa does, according to Michiel Wielhouwer.
The newly installed president and country manager for Visa Canada says most believe the company issues payment cards to consumers, and accepts payments on behalf of merchants, neither of which is accurate.
“We’re leveraging a wide variety of partners, banks and Fintechs to issue those products, so they have got a direct consumer relationship, not Visa,” he explains. “We also don’t accept card payments, and we don’t sign contracts with merchants to accept cards; we work through our partner network of banks, and they sign up businesses and merchants.”
Despite the brand’s prominence, Wielhouwer clarifies that much of its work happens behind the scenes maintaining, securing and improving its global payments network, all of which have become more complex in the age of mobile connectivity and artificial intelligence.
Born just outside of Utrecht, Netherlands, Wielhouwer had the foresight to combine his business and economics degree with information technology training when he enrolled in university in 1991, correctly predicting the two would become intertwined.
After spending five years as a consultant for Teradata in Amsterdam, Wielhouwer’s close relationship with European banks eventually lead to a role with Visa in London in 2002. Two years later, he returned to the Netherlands to serve as its country manager for Visa, while still in his 20s.
Over the next 14 years his career spanned Visa’s Amsterdam, London, and Brussels offices, eventually leading to a position as the company’s executive director for France, Belgium, and Luxembourg in 2018. Earlier this year Wielhouwer took on his latest challenge in Canada, a country he had never stepped foot in previously.
Visa’s global operations include partnerships with 14,500 financial institutions and more than 130 million merchant locations across 200 countries. The more than 4.5 billion Visa accounts worldwide are used in roughly 300 billion transactions a year, totalling more than $15 trillion The approximately 90 million accounts in Canada alone are used to facilitate an estimated 6 billion transactions a year.
The Star recently spoke to Wielhouwer from Visa’s Canadian headquarters in downtown Toronto about his first impressions of Canada, the differences and similarities with the European market, the push for a cardless future, and the challenges of preventing payment fraud in the world of generative AI.
How did you land a country manager position with Visa in your 20s?
One of my projects was to look at markets where Visa was not as strong as we wanted it to be, and the Netherlands was one of them, which was my home market. Visa asked me to write up a country strategy and execute it accordingly.
It was a huge responsibility, but that’s what I like about Visa; they give people the chance to grow. I was very well mentored and supported by the company, so I didn’t feel alone, but it was a great learning opportunity. Today Visa is doing very well in the Netherlands, which I’m very proud to see.
You then worked all over Europe for Visa. Why so many moves?
It was part of a development program. Each market had a different challenge, and working on them was seen as part of that development process. Ultimately, I landed in France looking after France, Belgium and Luxembourg, and those were the bigger markets for us on the continent, and that was a fantastic challenge to really build up a big team in Paris as our market share started to grow in those markets. Visa develops career plans for individuals, and really helped me grow within the company.
Does that mean Canada is just another stop in that development program?
For me it’s a longer-term destination. I see this as a market with great potential, and Visa does too.
What are some of the similarities and differences?
The market dynamics are quite similar in terms of having a few large banks and large group of smaller banks, plus innovation through Fintechs entering the payment markets in similar ways. The national networks like Interac, companies that sometimes partner and sometimes compete, that is very familiar to me. And just the way people see credit is very similar.
From the outside it looks very similar, but the devil is in the details. It’s a unique market with great talent, a great open economy, and I do believe that great things can be achieved here.
Had you ever been to Canada before?
I had worked with Canada in terms of clients that were operating here from Europe, so I understood the market dynamics, but I had never been before. The great thing with Visa is it sounds like a huge company, but it’s relatively small — we have about 300 people, mostly in Toronto — so I was fortunate to work with Canadian colleagues to understand the market before I came.
What were your first impressions?
What I really like is the open and friendly attitude of Canadians. It’s very inclusive, very understanding of different cultures. People keep their own identity here far more than in other markets.
What do Canadians not understand about Visa?
They believe that we’re issuing debit, credit or prepaid cards to consumers or small businesses, which we don’t. We also don’t accept card payments, and we don’t sign contracts with merchants to accept cards. We work through our partner network of banks, and they sign up businesses and merchants to accept cards, all within the guidelines Visa has set up.
What does the company offer Canadians directly?
We try to be the engine of commerce, and really want to make sure that everybody has trust in payments and that we are the best way to pay and be paid — not only with cards, but any kind of movement of money between parties. Visa facilitates that so it happens fast but also remains secure, so that people maintain trust with the system.
How do you balance the speed and security?
With generative AI, and with the thumbprint and facial recognition capabilities on phones now, there are many tools to make sure that security and fraud protection do not come at the cost of friction.
Globally we’re rolling out what we call “Click to Pay,” a network agnostic push to make sure payments on the internet are not slowed down by authentication codes. We’re pushing hard to get rid of card numbers in e-commerce and switch to what we call tokenized transactions, which basically means that its anonymized and makes the card number invisible. We’re leveraging generative AI and biometrics to make the eCommerce experience as seamless, safe and secure as in-store.
Where does generative AI come into play?
We see a lot of transactions globally, and we are using AI to detect fraud trends around the world and sharing those insights with our banking partners and our merchants so they can understand, anticipate and prevent fraud locally.
Many Canadians feel inundated with spam calls, emails, and text messages. Is fraud becoming more widespread?
Fraudsters have the same generative AI solutions that banks and other institutions use to protect themselves, so from their perspective it’s easier to attack consumers directly. Visa has invested around $11 billion in cybersecurity and fraud protection, and last year alone we prevented $40 billion in fraud by applying those solutions to make sure consumers and merchants can protect themselves.
Are there any innovations from Europe that you hope to bring to Canada?
There are three elements I would like to see more of in this market.
The first one is around collaboration on fraud. In Europe there’s a stronger collaboration between all the participants to combat fraud, and I see some great initiatives happening here in Canada, driven by Payments Canada.
Open banking is another area where Europe is leading the way, and we see some great examples where open banking delivers a better customer experience and an easier way to deal with the financial industry.
We also see a greater push for account-to-account payments in Europe. The challenge there is that once it was introduced fraud increased significantly, and they have not found the right answer yet. Visa is working to leverage the learnings we have around fraud prevention for cards to replicate some of those account-to-account services, so consumers and merchants maintain trust in their payment ecosystem.
European regulators are criticized for moving too quickly, while Canadian regulators are criticized for moving too slow. What do you think is the right pace?
Regulatory dynamics are different here, but I feel that they are far more focused on collaboration and understanding before taking steps, which I think is a healthy approach. The challenge we face in some areas of Europe is that some regulation has unintended consequences, and that doesn’t help us as an industry.
What do you hope to achieve here in Canada?
In the shorter term we’re really focused on reducing fraud, supporting small and medium sized businesses to make that segment more digitized and give consumers more innovations so they feel that payments on the internet are as safe as they are in store. We really want to make sure that even the micro sellers are able to not only pay with their phone, but also receive payment on their phone, so that their phone becomes a payment terminal.
Overall, I really want to make sure that Visa continues to grow as an important player in the ecosystem — and not only for cards — and consumers, merchants, banks and all the FinTech’s that are participating in the Visa ecosystem feel that they’ve got trust in the brand.
