Good morning. Thank you for joining. I'm going to resist the temptation to read out the agenda slide that's currently on your screen — you can see it — and instead start with the question that this entire session is designed to answer.

You've signed with Visa Direct. Your contract is done. There is, right now, a live API sitting in sandbox waiting for your integration. And somewhere in your organisation — whether that's your CTO, your CPO, or your Head of Payments — someone is asking: how long until we're actually moving money?

The industry average, based on our data across UK and European clients, is 90 to 120 days from contract to first live transaction. Our clients who follow a structured activation approach get there in 30. This session is about how.

We have 60 minutes. I'll cover the commercial case for speed. My colleague from Solutions Engineering will walk you through the actual integration path live. We'll talk about the three places most integrations stall — and how to unblock them. And we'll leave you with a 5-step action plan you can take straight into your next engineering sprint.

If you have questions, put them in the chat. We'll take a structured Q&A from minute 52. Let's get into it.

Here's something that doesn't come up enough in integration conversations. Every month you're in sandbox is a month of TPV you will never recover.

Our 6-month forecast model for the UK client cohort shows a baseline ramp loss of just under 30%. Meaning: if your platform has the potential to process £5 billion in payment volume through Visa Direct over a 6-month period — which is a real number for platforms at scale — a 3-month delayed go-live costs you approximately £1.5 billion in realised volume. Not revenue. But the volume on which your revenue is calculated.

The second reason speed matters is compounding. Clients who reach their first €500K/month TPV milestone within 30 days of go-live consistently reach €1M within 60 days. It's not linear — early activation builds internal momentum, it builds customer adoption, and it builds the data you need to unlock corridor expansion conversations with us.

Clients who take 90+ days to reach €500K almost always plateau there. The activation window closes, engineering attention moves elsewhere, and the platform ends up with a Visa Direct integration that processes a fraction of its potential volume.

This is not a technology problem. It is an activation problem. And it is entirely solvable. Let me show you how.

Clients who go live in 30 days follow a consistent pattern. It's not about working faster — it's about sequencing correctly. Here's the framework we've distilled from our fastest activations.

Week 1: Scope and credential setup. The single most common reason integrations run long is credential delays. Your developer needs API keys, test account credentials, and access to the Visa Developer Centre before they write a single line of code. This sounds obvious. It takes most clients 2–3 weeks to sort out. If you do nothing else from today, go back to your organisation and confirm that credentials are in your developer's hands before your next sprint starts.

• Confirm API credentials issued — target Day 2 at the latest
• Scope your first use case to the simplest possible transaction: single push-to-card, domestic, fixed amount
• Identify your internal compliance sign-off path now — don't leave it to Week 3

Week 2: Sandbox integration and initial test cases. Your target here is your first successful sandbox transaction by Day 10. Not a perfect integration — a working one. The Visa Developer Centre documentation covers the core endpoints. Our Solutions Engineering team runs weekly office hours during this phase for clients in the fast-track program — your Solutions Engineer's contact is in the onboarding email you received.

Week 3: Certification. Certification is the stage most clients underestimate. It is not a rubber stamp — it is a structured test suite. The good news: we publish the test cases in advance. Clients who review the certification checklist at the start of Week 1 — not Week 3 — pass first time 80% of the time. Clients who encounter it fresh in Week 3 almost always need a second attempt, which adds two weeks.

Week 4: Production deployment and first live transaction. The goal of Week 4 is a live transaction in production — even if it's £1 to a test card. That transaction confirms your integration, starts your TPV clock, and triggers your Client Success onboarding sequence. Everything after this is growth, not activation.

[SE intro — 1 minute] Thanks. I'm going to walk you through exactly what your developers will experience, using the actual Visa Developer Centre. No slides — just the real environment. If you're on the call and you're a developer or technical lead, pay close attention to the credential setup and the certification flow — those are the two places I see the most time lost.

Step 1: Developer Centre account and app creation. [Live demo: navigate to developer.visa.com, create app, show API key generation] Your developers need to create a project in the Developer Centre. Each project generates a unique API key pair. Keep your sandbox and production keys separate — I've seen production outages caused by sandbox credentials being used in error. Name your project clearly, including the environment.

• Show: Project creation flow (approx. 3 minutes live)
• Show: API key download — emphasise storing private key securely
• Point to: Documentation index — highlight Push Funds endpoint as starting point

Step 2: First sandbox transaction. [Live demo: Postman collection or equivalent, send Push Funds request, show 200 response] I'm using the Postman collection we provide — link is in the chat. You don't have to use Postman but it's the fastest way to validate your environment. Here is a Push Funds call — this is the core Visa Direct transaction type. You can see the request structure: sender, recipient card number in sandbox format, amount, currency. Send it. And there's the 200.

That transaction — in sandbox — represents the same integration that moves billions of pounds through this network every month. The API call you just watched is the same one Western Union, Remitly, and hundreds of UK fintechs use in production. The complexity is in the edge cases and the certification, not in the core call.

Step 3: Common response codes and error handling. [Show: error code reference, walk through top 5] Before certification, your developers should be handling at minimum: insufficient funds responses, invalid recipient errors, and compliance holds. These are the three that appear most often in UK client integrations. The certification test suite will test all of them.

Step 4: Certification walkthrough. [Show: certification portal, test case categories] Certification has four test categories: core transaction flows, error handling, webhook receipt and acknowledgement, and for clients processing above a certain volume, fraud signal handling. I'll flag this: the webhook tests are the most commonly failed. Your server needs to respond within 5 seconds and return a 200. Make sure your engineering team knows this before they submit for certification, not during it.

Based on our analysis of UK client integrations over the past 18 months, three blockers account for over 80% of delayed go-lives. I want to give you the specific playbook for each one.

Blocker 1: Credential and access delays. This is the most common and the most preventable. The fix is simple: your Client Success Manager can issue sandbox credentials within 24 hours of a signed contract. If you don't have them, call your CS lead today — not next week. If credentials have been issued but your developers haven't received them, that is an internal routing problem, not a Visa problem. Assign a named owner for API credential management in your organisation.

Blocker 2: Compliance sign-off bottleneck. Going live with Visa Direct requires internal compliance approval at your organisation — typically covering KYC/KYB flows, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring thresholds. These are your compliance team's requirements, not ours. The mistake clients make is leaving this conversation until Week 3 or 4. Your compliance team needs 2–3 weeks to review a new payment rail. Start that conversation in Week 1. Give them our compliance documentation pack — your CS lead can send it. Get a named date for sign-off before your engineering build begins.

Blocker 3: Webhook certification failure. As my colleague noted — 5 second response window, return a 200. Beyond that, the most common cause of webhook certification failure is environment-specific firewall rules that block inbound calls from Visa Direct IP ranges. Your network team needs to whitelist the Visa Direct webhook IP range before certification. That list is in the Developer Centre documentation. Again — do this in Week 1, not Week 3.

Going live is not the finish line. It's the starting gun. The target for your first 30 days in production is €500K in monthly TPV. That number isn't arbitrary — it's the threshold at which Visa Direct activates your growth services programme, including corridor opportunity analysis and use-case expansion conversations.

Three things drive first-month TPV. First: the number of users or merchants you've enabled on the Visa Direct flow from Day 1. Don't soft-launch with 5% of your volume while you monitor. If your integration has passed certification, it's ready for full volume. Start there.

Second: your customer communication. We have seen clients go live silently — no announcement, no feature flag to customers, no in-app prompt — and wonder why TPV is flat. If your customers don't know they can be paid faster, they won't use it. Build a simple comms moment around your go-live: email, in-app notification, whatever your channel is. It doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to exist.

Third: monitor your decline rates daily in the first two weeks. New integrations sometimes have higher decline rates due to routing configuration or recipient card type mismatches. We can see your decline data from our side — your CS lead reviews it weekly — but daily monitoring from your side in the first two weeks lets you catch configuration issues before they affect customer experience.

Read live questions from chat. Below are prepared answers for the most common questions — have these ready.

We're at the hour. Let me close with the five actions that, if you do them this week, will put you on the 30-day path.

One: confirm API credentials are in your developer's hands today — not next week.

Two: review the certification checklist now, before your integration sprint begins. Link is in the chat.

Three: open your internal compliance conversation today. Schedule a 30-minute call with your compliance team and share the documentation pack your CS lead will send you.

Four: whitelist Visa Direct webhook IPs with your network team before Week 3.

Five: if you're stuck — or if you want a 1:1 review of your specific integration path — book time with your Client Success Manager. The link to book is in the follow-up email you'll receive within the hour.

Thank you for your time. The recording will be available within 24 hours. We look forward to seeing your first live transaction.