Visa Europe is enhancing its mobile payment service with two new features: Multi-Currency and Immediate Payments. They’ll be available to any of the organisation’s member banks and payment service providers.
Immediate Payments is being launched in the UK this week, making it possible for consumers to receive money sent from other mobile phones in less than 30 minutes.
The Multi-Currency feature will be available by the end of 2013. This allows payments to be sent and received across international borders, letting consumers send money in any European currency to another Visa cardholder in Europe.
Visa’s mobile payment service is called Personal Payments. It enables anyone with a Visa credit, debit or reloadable prepaid card to send payments to another Visa card without needing to share their account details. Recipients don’t need to be signed up for the service. 17 financial institutions already offer the Visa Personal Payments service via their own mobile apps, including RBS and NatWest in the UK.
Sandra Alzetta, Senior Vice President of Visa Europe, said “Mobile payments have the potential to fundamentally change the way that people pay and are paid. The new Multi-Currency and Immediate Payments features combine the convenience of mobile device use with the ability to send money to 460million Visa cardholders across Europe, solving a problem that millions of consumers face every day – giving money to another individual easily and securely.”