I had a chance to spend some time at Visa’s booth and talk to folks from the company. They’ve been telling me about all their endeavors to make mobile payments part of everyday lives for people all around the world.
For emerging markets, Visa has an USSD-based solution that allows folks with basic feature phones to move money from one account to the other. In India for instance, Visa is behind the service called Movida, using which users can top-up their prepaid account, buy movie tickets and pay their utility bills. Additionally, they are working on person to person mobile payment service for the developed countries, though it’s still in its infancy.
The key theme of our conversation was NFC and the newly launched partnership with Vodafone. Under the deal, the new Visa payWave service will make the Visa prepaid account available to users of Vodafone’s stored value account. Of course you’ll need an NFC-enabled device to take advantage of the new service. Moreover, the phone you intend to use with Visa payWave should also get certification from the company, which isn’t a problem since they’ve already cleared all popular NFC-enabled smartphones.
According to Visa, Vodafone’s decision to partner with them is a good choice for the carrier (though we didn’t expect them to say it’s a bad one). In fact, carriers can either make their own service from scratch — build distribution network and infrastructure, deal with merchants, regulatory bodies and even handle some financial operations — or use a company which has existing deals with banks and billions of clients (card holders) around the world. Visa strength comes from the sheer number of their cards on the market — at the moment there are some 2 billion credit and debit Visa accounts across the world.
All in all, my impression is that Visa knows what it’s doing and is well prepared for the NFC revolution. It has both the technology and a vast distribution network to make contactless payments a reality. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for too long for the day when our mobile phones will also act as wallets…