Visa Europe’s plan to annually invest 100 million euros (US$144.2 million) into mobile payments and e-commerce illustrates that the card association views the two markets as its next major growth opportunity, observes one analyst.
The investment will help lead to commercial mobile-payment rollouts starting at the end of this year, company CEO Peter Ayliffe said during an April 8 presentation at the Visa Insight conference in Barcelona.
Zilvinas Bareisis, a senior analyst for Celent, tells PaymentSource his recent conversations with Visa Europe revealed that mobile payments is high on the card association’s agenda.
“The way they are thinking about this, if they build a platform for their banks to leverage, they would be fulfilling that role as an association that provides benefits to the whole banking community,” he says.
Visa Europe is an association of some 4,000 member European banks that collectively issued more than 419 million Visa debit, credit and commercial cards throughout the European Union as of the end of September. The association formed in 2004 and remained independent after Visa Inc. went public in 2008.
That Visa Europe is investing funds into mobile and e-commerce suggests it will provide a platform from which its member banks can provide their own services, Bareisis says. “It’s sort of similar to the cards model,” he adds.
Indeed, Ayliffe during his speech at the conference highlighted Visa Europe’s card growth over the past year as it has worked to move paper cash use to electronic payments. The association anticipates its cardholders will spend a combined 2 trillion euros with their cards by 2015.
“In just 10 years, we have moved from 1 euro in every 18 euros spent in Europe on a Visa card to 1 euro in 8 euros,” Ayliffe said. “Today, we have committed to accelerate this displacement of cash by bringing to the market ways to pay that bring true convergence between electronic payments and mobile and e-commerce technology.”
Those remarks clearly indicate Visa Europe still is very much discussing the war against cash, with mobile payment playing a key role in that process, Bareisis says.
Since 2004, Visa Europe has invested some 1 billion euros in payment technology, the company revealed in its annual report. Those funds have contributed to the company’s efforts to promote its transaction-processing infrastructure, contactless technology, and mobile and e-commerce payments.
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