The first U.S. financial institutions are expected to make Visa personal payments available to their customers through CashEdge and Fiserv by the second half of 2011.
SAN FRANCISCO – Visa announced this morning it will be offering its card holders person-two-person money transfers through their credit union or bank in the coming months.
The cards company said it is launching its own P2P offerings through separate deals with Fiserv’s ZashPay and CashEdge’s Popmoney.
“This is a milestone for Visa. We are extending the utility of our global network from payments at the point of sale, to payments among individuals," said Matthew Dill, global head of personal payments and digital money transfer at Visa Inc.
“The exact same Visa card you pull out of your wallet to make purchases at the point-of-sale can now be used to receive a payment from a friend or family member,” said Dill. “For fifty years, Visa has worked to simplify payments; we are now evolving our network capability to make it easier for our cardholders to pay one another.”
The new Visa personal payments service was made possible through technical enhancements to VisaNet, Visa’s global payments processing network, and through the introduction of a new Visa transaction type that allows financial institutions to accept incoming funds.
Through the separate agreements, CashEdge and Fiserv will have access to VisaNet, enabling them to integrate the Visa personal payment service into their respective person-to-person platforms - Popmoney and ZashPay. This will allow a participating credit unions’ and bank’s customers to send money directly to a Visa account.
More than 700 financial institutions have signed up to offer ZashPay, and the service is already live at 500 credit unions and banks. Popmoney is currently deployed at more than 170 leading U.S. financial institutions, including five top 20 US banks. The service provides support for text messaging, WAP and downloadable mobile applications.
The first U.S. financial institutions are expected to make Visa personal payments available to their customers through CashEdge and Fiserv by the second half of 2011.
