Visa Personal Payments is a mobile money transfer service the company offers through its financial institution members. Visa this week announced two important enhancements to the service as its deployed in Europe. First, it will enable users to send funds country-to-country regardless of currency. That feature will be available later this year. The other feature is the ability to transfer funds in near real time.
Immediate Payments, meanwhile, is a more technical feature update that will allow users to receive money sent through the Visa Personal Payments system in under half an hour. It’s launching in the UK this week, with other markets following “later in the year.”
Visa Personal Payments is applicable for anyone with a credit, debit or reloadable prepaid card issued by Visa. Senders simply register for the service through their chosen bank, pairing an account with their mobile phone number.
As we noted in our post yesterday on Fiserv’s new Popmoney Instant Transfer service, the expanding consumer money transfer segment is rapidly evolving its key criteria for success with real-time money movement leading the way. Running a close second is user convenience. Visa’s service eliminates sender and receiver registration, but limits the transfer to taking place on a Visa-branded product. This lack of ubiquitous acceptance is a near-term barrier in the personal money transfer market and is something that cash displacement strategists will have to contend with going forward.
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