September 24, 2014 - Visa is ramping up its tech investment, creating 2000 full-time technologist positions and opening a development centre in India.

The jobs will be a mix of brand new roles and conversions of contractors to full-time employees. The hires will be made over the next couple of years in India, Singapore and Austin and San Francisco in the US, and will span everything from Data scientists, to engineers, platform architects and mobile developers.

Next year will also see a new technology development centre opened in India, which will house teams focused on key APIs and SDKs to help partner firms more easily access VisaNet. The first set of these new developer tools will be publicly released before the end of 2014.

Visa has been investing heavily in its tech operations as it seeks to maintain its dominant position in the era of online and mobile payments, which is seeing the card giant challenged from all sides.

It recently launched Visa Checkout, a system which lets virtual shoppers complete purchases with a couple of clicks. It has also been working hard on security, pushing the switch to digital account tokens as replacements for card numbers for online and mobile purchasing.

Rajat Taneja, EVP, technology, says: "This investment allows us to strengthen our talent pool globally, and bring more of it in-house, providing greater opportunity for professionals to grow their careers with the technology payments leader."