Ericsson and Visa Extend m-Payments Platforms

More activity on the mobile payments front, with Ericsson launching its Money service in seven European markets, and Visa making deals with specialists Monitise and Fundamo.

Focal Points:

• M-payments are gathering significant momentum in Europe now, following a trend that previously was mainly driven by emerging economies. From now, Ericsson said users in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Sweden can sign up at its Ericsson Money website to send and receive money and withdraw cash.
• "This is the first step toward bringing a full suite of convenient, cost efficient, secure and instant mobile financial services to consumers globally," said the Ericsson statement. Money can be loaded to a digital wallet using a credit or debit card and can be used to transfer funds to anyone else with an Ericsson Money account. The eWallet can also be linked to an Ericsson Money prepaid MasterCard.
• The service will be extended to the rest of Europe soon, and the vendor will also expand it to support bill payments, online shopping and interconnection with similar offerings from third parties.
• Meanwhile, Visa has the most comprehensive plan in the US to combine NFC-enabled m-payments with online and plastic systems. It has added two partnerships to its platform, firstly signing a new long term commercial agreement with mobile payment solutions provider Monitise. The pair will roll out m-payments, person-to-person payments, mobile transaction alerts and mobile marketing services optimized for Visa DPS debit and prepaid transactions.
• The two firms said they will also work together to extend the mobile financial services to banked Visa account holders. The partnership comes two years after Visa acquired a 14.4% stake in Monitise, valued at $13m and follows last month's announcement that the credit card processing giant would collaborate with a long line of banks to introduce a mobile digital wallet, storing credit and debit card details on a phone.

Visa has also acquired mobile financial services provider Fundamo for about $110m in cash. million in cash for privately held Fundamo--the acquisition is expected to close today. The Fundamo platform supports mobile services targeted at unbanked and under-banked consumers, including person-to-person payment, airtime top-up, bill payment and branchless banking. Fundamo has 50 active deployments across more than 40 countries, most of them in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.