AB Talks: How Visa is living its purpose with new CEMEA headquarters

Well that is what has inspired global digital payments giant Visa, which has opened its new regional headquarters in Dubai.

The 100,000 square foot building, in Dubai Internet City, will be home to the company’s 500 staff and will serve Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) region.

At its core, the headquarters, say Visa, is both a statement about the future of work for its family of employees, but also stands as a vote of confidence in the region and its vision to connect economies and create opportunity and prosperity for billions of unbanked across the world, plus support SMEs and small businesses who need to evolve into digital businesses.

Dan Baxter (below), vice president of corporate communications CEMEA, said: “I think companies everywhere went from a very traditional working style to an approach which none of us could have expected, we went from being in the office to working from home for over a year-and-a-half, we’ve learned a lot along the way.

“We’ve seen how productive and how efficient and how smooth remote working can be, even among big groups and big teams, but we also learned that a lot of us really miss the office environment.

“There’s great benefits to being in the office that we’ve experienced in the past, and we know we want to be able to come back to, so I think having the combination between the flexible hybrid remote working, and office environments where people can come together, they can brainstorm, they can collaborate, really will get the best of both worlds.”

Some highlights of the CEMEA headquarters include the 10,000 square feet innovation centre that supports Visa’s commitment to co-create the future of commerce with partners and employees, through agile and design thinking methodologies.

The centre features include immersive experience zones that allow in-situ prototyping, such as a connected home, rapid transit, connected car, crypto zone, retail concept, airline lounge, and small merchant bazaar. It also features technologies such as a hypermatrix wall, and purpose-built briefing centres and collaboration zones.

The new space also houses CEMEA’s first Visa University campus, which will host a string of training and educational programs for Visa employees, clients and partners.

Dr. Saeeda Jaffar (below), GCC group country manager, said: “The headquarters is a sign of Visa’s  commitment to the region. This is a very important part of the world for us.

“And really what this symbolises is the ability to be in the middle of this connected world, bringing different parts of the worlds together.

“It’s a very exciting place for us as there is a business purpose, but then there’s a much broader societal purpose, and they are one in the same in many aspects. So from a business purpose, if you will, we like to facilitate the transfer of value.

“We are very much a purpose-led organisation. We believe that economies that take care of all do much better than they would otherwise.

“Part of that purpose is inclusion. It is extremely important to us. When people think of inclusion, sometimes they think about one small group. When we think of inclusion, we think of it very broadly, we think of the two billion people who are unbanked, many more that are underbanked, those that may not have the right opportunities today.

“And, therefore, we work with a lot of different social impact initiatives. We work with underserved minorities. So there’s a very large focus on the individual side of inclusion but equally important is the institutional side of inclusion. There are about 200 million SMEs globally today, micro and small, that are not in the fold. Today. They’re not in the financial fold, how do we work with them? How do we bring them into the fold?

“For us, it’s very much about uplifting those and bringing them with us into the financial fold and forging the journey together.”

(Source: ArabianBusiness YouTube channel)