The sudden boom in mobile payments and mobile money services has taken another twist with Monitise signing an exclusive deal with Visa Europe that gives the mobile money company access to Visa’s €500million pan-European interbanking payment network so that it can create, what it calls “mobile finance and payment applications for Visa’s inter-bank processing service”.
Under the deal, Monetise will be the main development partner for Visa, creating consumer-orientated mobile payment services that will be rolled out to every single bank that Visa works with across Europe.
Details are sketchy, but the deal marks 2011 down as the year mobile payments finally come to fruition following hot on the heels of the news of Everything Everywhere’s mobile payments roll out last week and Starbuck’s ground-breaking mobile payment app the week before.
In fact, according to the latest analysis from Juniper Research, the need to access basic financial services by users in developing countries will drive the short term growth of active mobile money users globally to exceed 200 million by 2013. Currently well under 100 million people use these services.
Juniper Research’s new report – ‘Mobile Money Transfers & Remittances: Markets, Forecasts & Vendor Strategies 2011-2015’ – also cautions that whilst there are several high profile examples of extremely successful mobile money services, each new rollout needs an established, robust and extensive local distribution network to ensure access to the service.
Howard Wilcox, Senior Analyst at Juniper Research gave more details of the market opportunities: “Our report reveals the sheer number of mobile money services, with more launches in the first eleven months of 2010 than in the whole of 2009. However, there are still many developing countries without these services, plus we’re seeing typically at least three services per country.”
