The U.K. mobile banking vendor Monitise PLC plans to offer international remittances that people could originate on handheld devices.
Ben Evetts, a spokesman for the London company, said last week that it is in talks with financial institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States, though he could not provide a time line for when the service will be tested or become commercially available.
Monitise Americas LLC, a Providence, R.I., joint venture between the British company and Metavante Technologies Inc., has announced that 20 banks and credit unions have signed up for its system, which uses Metavante's NYCE debit network to transmit account data to mobile devices. Lisa Stanton, the chief executive of Monitise Americas, said most of the venture's customers are still in the testing stage.
Mr. Evetts said Monitise PLC has announced plans to develop "payment ecosystems" in remittance destination markets such as Africa and India. Metavante and other partners it hopes to recruit in destination countries would develop "remittance corridors" into markets such as Latin America.
The goal would be to develop systems that would enable recipients to have remittances deposited directly into their bank accounts, but Monitise also would work with money transfer companies to provide cash from their locations, though it has no such agreements in place yet, Mr. Evetts said.
"This isn't about disintermediating the Western Unions of the world at all," he said.
