Visa Platform Offers Small Businesses Access to Financing, Marketing and Tech Support

The Visa & Main platform will continue adding resources, programming and local activations, the company said in a Thursday (Feb. 5) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

“With Visa & Main, we’re connecting Visa’s products and in-house knowledge with the expertise of our clients and partners to provide small businesses with flexible financing opportunities and customer acquisition and technology support,” Kim Lawrence, regional president of North America at Visa, said in the release. “It’s a platform built to meet small business owners where they are — in our local neighborhoods and at community events across the country.”

To expand small business owners’ access to financing, Visa has launched a $100 million working capital facility with community-focused lender Lendistry. Visa & Main will add more grant opportunities and financial support programs in the coming months, according to the release.

To help entrepreneurs reach more customers, the platform offers marketing support, signage, digital guides, workshops and other resources, the Thursday press release said. Resources will be available for both everyday marketing and big events that may come to the small business owner’s town.

To assist small businesses with their digital transformation, Visa & Main will provide training for, and easier access to, digital payment acceptance tools, expense management and money-movement capabilities, risk and fraud-mitigation solutions, and digital enablement and financial education support, per the release. The platform will also include everyday savings programs and offers.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Global Digital Shopping Index: SMB Edition,” which was commissioned by Visa, found that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are 45% less likely to offer a seamless cross-channel shopping experience than large merchants.

SMBs also offer eight fewer digital shopping features, on average, than large merchants, even though shoppers want to use the same digital shopping features regardless of channel or merchant size.

Visa & Main joins several other programs the company introduced to help businesses in a variety of sectors. Visa said in November that it is investing in, and providing specialized financial tools and resources to, content creators. The company said it aims to help creators scale their businesses locally and globally.