Visa Inc. announced a new person-to-person (P2P) money transfer service for U.S. consumers. According to the announcement, consumers of participating banks will be able to send and receive funds anywhere in the world through eligible Visa-branded cards.
The service includes the ability to send funds from a Visa account to e-mail and mobile phone accounts. The service also enables consumers to send and receive funds with a Visa account using a mobile browser to access a participating financial institution or partner’s website.
Visa said technical enhancements to its global payment processing network, VisaNet, and the introduction of a new transaction type that allows financial institutions to accept incoming funds, make the new P2P service possible.
“For fifty years, Visa has worked to simplify payments at the merchant point of sale; we are now evolving our network capability to make it easier for our account holders to pay one another,” said Jim McCarthy, global head of products at Visa Inc.
As a part of the announcement, Visa also disclosed new agreements with CashEdge Inc. and Fiserv Inc., providers of money transfer and technology solutions for financial institutions. The agreements allow CashEdge and Fiserv direct access to VisaNet in order to integrate Visa’s new P2P services into their own P2P platforms. The agreements also allow consumers to access the new Visa P2P services using CashEdge’s Popmoney or Fiserv’s ZashPay networks.
“Through our agreements with Fiserv and CashEdge, we can accelerate the delivery of new and innovative Visa payments services, and better enable financial institutions to extend these services to customers,” McCarthy said.
Visa said U.S. financial institutions are expected to make the new P2P service available to their customers through CashEdge and Fiserv by the second half of 2011.
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