Visa has relaunched its top-tier card as a “flexible platform”. The idea is that affluent customers no longer want the same fixed bundle of perks as everyone else, and banks should be able to tailor the card to them. But the Visa Infinite Series announcement is written for the banks. The cardholder hardly features in it.
Visa announced the series in Johannesburg on 23 September “through its banking partners” and didn’t name one. There’s no mention of either a rollout date or fees, and there’s been no mention as to what a South African cardholder gets that they can’t already get.
Visa Infinite already exists here. Nedbank Private Wealth offers it as its top-tier card, with unlimited premium lounge access for you and a guest at more than 1 300 lounges through the Visa Airport Companion app. Visa’s own South African page lists Dragonpass lounge access and a concierge line for Sub-Saharan Africa. So the Series has to add something to that, and the release says what it intends: to move away from a “traditional fixed premium proposition” to one issuers can shape and evolve over time. Country manager Lineshree Moodley says the goal is a proposition that “can evolve with customers”.
Configurable means each bank decides how much to put in, and premium cards are judged on the distance between what’s promised and what arrives. Visa’s global site already describes a tiered structure, and its UAE site lists an Infinite Privilege level with higher limits and better approval rates. The release doesn’t say whether either is coming here. It says only that payment features will be limited to those “approved and available in the market”, which suggests the global brochure and the local card will differ.
Mercedes-Benz took a similar route when it became the first carmaker to build in-car fingerprint payments on Visa’s authentication and token technology. It launched in Germany first, with other European markets to follow, so customers got what Mercedes chose to ship and when.
The partners named include Banyan Group, Lacure Villas, Jet Class and Kensington Yachts, the Paris department stores Printemps and La Samaritaine, SupperClub dining, and concierge providers Quintessentially and Ten. The release doesn’t say which of them operate in South Africa. Visa Destinations, the travel discovery layer, highlights Dubai, London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, New York and Sydney, and Johannesburg and Cape Town aren’t on that list. The release says “some of the partners”, so there may be local ones, but Visa didn’t lead with them at a South African launch.
Still unknown: which banks will launch it, whether existing Infinite holders will see any change, and whether a local benefits list will appear next to the Paris and Dubai ones. Until a bank publishes a name, a fee and a benefits list, the Series is a framework with no product attached.