Visa Acquires Fundamo and Expends Its Agreement with Monitise
- Two new partnerships now enable Visa to expand its mobile payment offers for financial institutions and address the needs of both banked and under-banked customers segments.
- South Africa-based Fundamo proposes more than fifty mobile financial services in 40 countries, including 27 Middle Eastern, Asian and African countries. Bringing interoperability to closed-loop card schemes, it enables P2P payment, branchless banking services, airtime top-up and bill payment.
- The British Monitise had already signed an exclusive agreement with Visa Europe. This new worldwide partnership should ensure mobile portability of all Visa services. In addition to offers similar to Fundamo’s, Monitise also proposes ticketing and m-commerce services. In the United States, this offer will mostly target banks and processors clients of VDPS (Visa) processing platform.
- These partnerships sustain Visa’s worldwide expansion and theoretically cover all expected needs for mobile services in Western countries as well as in developing countries.
- The international card scheme then remains ahead of its rival, MasterCard. Since spring 2010, it acquired two e-PSPs: CyberSource, and, this winter, California-based PlaySpan, specialising in online payment of digital goods. It converts digital currencies created by interactive websites, e.g. gaming websites.
See February 2011 Watch