The international credit card company Visa will open a research and development center in Herzliya, The Times of Israel reported Thursday. Visa will be extending its new European collaboration hub, called Visa Euro Collab, to Israel. The goal of the Collabs is to boost startups’ chances for success by leveraging Visa’s connections in the financial sector.

With the move, Visa joins fellow credit card firm MasterCard, which has been working in Israel for over four years. But Visa has not been avoiding Israel; in fact, the entire Visa Europe Collab financial technology hub, as the program is known, is brand new. The first Collab hub was opened in London at the beginning of May, and three weeks later, Visa has opened its second Collab branch – in Tel Aviv.

The Collabs aim to take advantage of the parent company’s many connections in the fintech business to discover innovative new technologies being developed by start-ups.

“Visa is in a unique position to help innovators develop and scale their ideas,” said Steve Perry, founder and co-creator of Visa Europe Collab. “We have 50 years of industry expertise as well as the connections and scale offered by more than 3,000 European member banks and financial organizations. Now, through our innovation hub, we are creating a network of partners and a community that will help us provide the mentoring, advice and experience start-ups and entrepreneurs need to get their ideas off the drawing board and into the commercial world.”

A number of Israeli startups have shown promise in detecting fraud, which explains Visa’s interest in setting up an R&D center in Israel. Similarly, Israeli expertise in other elements of cybersecurity have attracted both corporate and academic interest in setting up a cybersecurity hub in Beersheba.

[Photo: frankieleon / Flickr ]