Visa Works with GSMA to Extend Access to Mobile Financial Services

Credit card merchant, Visa has announced plans to work with the GSM Association to advance the delivery of mobile financial services around the world. As part of the continuing collaboration between the two organizations, the GSMA has selected Visa as a provider for mobile money transfer solutions globally, and is working to execute an agreement to formalize participation terms.

Visa is already providing money transfer solutions with active programs in 14 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

"By combining the world's largest retail electronic payments network and the world's most popular wireless technology, we can take Visa beyond the card to mobile handsets, a move that can help accelerate the deployment of mobile payment services," said Elizabeth Buse, Global Head of Product for Visa. "Beyond growing our business, enabling money transfer and payments on mobile handsets has the potential to make a profound difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide."

A key aspect of the collaboration between Visa and GSMA will be the creation of standards for mobile money transfer, mobile payments and related services. This collaboration will allow carriers and financial institutions to deploy mobile payments more rapidly and limit market fragmentation. Standardization also benefits consumers by promoting interoperability among carriers and institutions, ensuring a consistent and reliable experience and promoting faster adoption of the technology.

Ongoing Collaboration Delivers Results

This announcement marks the latest development in the ongoing collaboration between Visa and the GSMA. Recently, as part of the GSMA Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, Visa and several GSM mobile network operators launched mobile payment trials in Canada, Switzerland, France and the UK, and completed successful trials in Australia, Malaysia and Taiwan, which are all designed to advance the development of mobile payments at the point of sale. Importantly, many of these trials embed the Visa payment application into the SIM card enabling Visa account holders to easily switch the application from one handset to another.

Covering more than a thousand test users and select merchants, all of these trials demonstrated the ability to download and personalize payment software over the air and make mobile payments using the same point of sale equipment already in place at merchants to accept contactless card transactions.

"Recent Visa programs conducted in partnership with GSM operators have enabled us to refine the technology, security and processing requirements necessary to make mobile payments a reality," said Buse. "Our experience has taught us that consumers globally want access to secure, reliable and flexible payment options that harness the power of mobile devices backed by the trust inherent in Visa's brand and network."

Posted to the site on 18th February 2009