Fintech

Visa Inc. is making a bigger play in person-to-person payments by teaming with CashEdge Inc. and Fiserv Inc. for new options in money transfers to and from Visa cards.

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.

Federal Bank Ltd. has become the latest bank to join the interbank funds-transfer service the National Payments Corp. of India launched last year, a spokesperson for the Kochi-based bank tells PaymentsSource.

PORTLAND, Ore. – Unitus Community CU pledged yesterday to continue offering free checking and free online services such as bill pay even as many banks are beginning to charge fees for the once-free services.

MADISON, Wis. – A special loan that lowers interest when members pay on time, a small business incubator for Gen Yers and a 60-day return policy for loans are among the new innovations being proposed by the Filene Research Institute’s i3 group.

Visa Inc.’s continued push to promote its card products in Latin America and the Caribbean region helped produce considerable growth for the company, as sales volume rose 28%, to $270 billion from $211 billion in 2009, according to the card brand.

WASHINGTON—The banking industry saw the first tangible signs of progress March 15 in its fight to overturn the Durbin amendment, as House and Senate lawmakers officially introduced bills that would delay implementation of a plan to restrict interchange fees on debit cards.

Payments-industry representatives rushed to throw support behind legislation introduced March 15 in the U.S. Senate that would delay implementation of new Federal Reserve Board rules that would cap debit interchange beginning this summer.

PayPal Inc. has paid LML Patent Corp., a wholly owned, indirect subsidiary of LML Payment Systems Inc., $7.5 million to settle a patent dispute that stemmed from an infringement complaint involving 19 other financial institutions, LML announced in a press release.

Major credit card networks on March 14 announced they are waiving interchange fees charities otherwise would pay card issuers on donations cardholders make to provide support for Japanese relief efforts in the wake of the devastation caused by last week’s earthquake and tsunami.