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Mobile banking will be important for providing information about transactions in the United States and in other countries with developed payment infrastructures, Elizabeth Buse, Visa Inc. global head of product, said today during a keynote address at SourceMedia's ATM Debit & Prepaid Forum in Chandler, Ariz. When Google Inc.'s Android phone begins operation later this month, Visa will have three applications available for the phone. One will offer text alerts, another will enable consumers to sign up for merchant offers, and the third will help consumers to find the closest merchant making an offer and the nearest Visa-connected ATM, Buse said. The applications illustrate how, in the U.S., mobile banking "will be mostly a value-added channel to provide information about a payment instead of replacing the payment itself," Buse said. Globally, how advanced a country's payment system is will determine the role of mobile banking and payments, she said. In such advanced countries as the U.S., Canada and Australia, replacing the current infrastructure will take time, and mobile banking likely will be a value-added informational service, Buse said. In countries such as Japan, where some electronic-payments technology exists but is not as widespread, mobile payments–in which the phone is used at the point of sale–will serve to complement cards, she said. In countries such as Senegal, where 4 million consumers have mobile phones, but not many have bank accounts, mobile payments will leapfrog more-developed countries and likely become more widely accepted than cards or other forms of electronic payments, Buse said.
