Visa has also introduced the ability to provide real-time substantiation of qualified, over-the-counter medical expense purchases made with a Visa employee benefit debit card.

The upgrades to VisaNet, the world’s largest payment network, took place simultaneously across Visa’s five global data centers. The business release changed 1.5 million lines of code while Visa’s payment system continued to process transactions at an average rate of 3,500 transaction messages per second. Semiannual upgrades focus on providing increases in operational efficiency, expansion of technology capabilities, and support for innovative new products and services.

The demands of Visa cardholders never stop changing, so we never stop improving and expanding the technology that is at the core of Visa’s value, said John Partridge, CEO of Inovant, Visa’s IT organization responsible for global transactions processing and technology development. Despite the fact that these are massive undertakings, in terms of complexity and time to prepare, we pride ourselves on implementing them smoothly without a single minute of downtime that could affect our members and cardholders.

For this round of updates, Visa has invested more than $31 million related to 32 discrete projects, involving nearly 280,000 hours of work by programmers, testers, analysts, designers, and managers who spent the last 12 months preparing for the release.

Among the most significant changes, the revised VisaNet system will:

– support the ability to use the full 16-digit card number for identifying whether a particular Visa Traditional or Visa Traditional Rewards consumer credit cardholder’s transaction would benefit from a program or service offered by the merchant or issuing financial institution.

– enable real-time substantiation of qualified, over-the-counter medical expense purchases made with a Visa employee benefit debit card at supermarkets, discount stores, and other merchants.

– provide a global implementation of Visa Resolve Online, which streamlines the process of handling disputed transactions.