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Sep. 26, 2008

Early this morning, Visa has announced a variety of mobile banking tests for its U.S. customers.

The tests focus on mobile payments and money transfers, which are already available in many other countries, especially in Eastern Asia.

Visa's most significant testing involves contactless payments using the Nokia 6212 Classic mobile phone, expected to ship in mid-October.

Nokia's 6512 phone includes a near-field communications chip, which Visa’s software will use to communicate with its bank partners.

In addition to actually paying for retail purchases, customers could use the phone to transfer funds and receive notifications of special offers and account activity, Visa officials said.

The credit card company also announced a money transfer experiment with U.S. Bank. That test is scheduled to begin by the end of 2008. Customers will access their accounts through mobile Web browsers.

A second phase will expand the system to overseas accounts in the first half of 2009.

Additionally, Visa announced plans for a “broadly available” mobile payment services.

But initially it’s only for customers of Google Android phones who also happen to be Chase bank customers.

Overall, users will be able to receive notifications about transaction activity, obtain offers from merchants, find those merchants on a map and find bank machines.

Meanwhile, the multitude of tests will continue, as has been the case for several years. Visa cited Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and the U.K. as potential locations where it already performs some testing similar to those announced this morning.

Visa said it plans to extend its new service to other banks soon, and presumably to other mobile phone operating systems in the near future.

Now market participants are expecting MasterCard and American Express to follow in the same path.

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    This article was featured on Business 5.0 and on Tech Blog.

Source: T-Mobile USA.