mVisa, a mobile solution by Visa will bring the benefits of easy and secure digital commerce to financial institutions, merchants and consumers in Nigeria based on four key pillars.
The four key pillar revolve around the consumer, banks, merchants and real-time information gathering.
To the consumer, mVisa will hand him control over payment on mobile; the merchant will experience easy-to-adopt, easy to use on the solutions with a different experience on loyalty rewards.
Also the banks should expect huge activation and usage and cash (physical) displacement. With the application, Visa said, banks might witness less expenses on card issuance and withdrawal on ATMs as consumers and merchants are to interface mostly on mVisa.
In terms of usage, the aim is to spike mobile money in nigeria, as it will assist operators and regulators on gathering data that will help shape the mobile money space, while assisting in acquiring and significantly scale up merchants and reduced operating expenses.
These were contained in a presentation by Andrew Torre, president for Visa Sub-Saharan Africa, during the app launch in Lagos recently.
He said that through mVisa, the Company is working with Diamond Bank, Fidelity Bank and First Bank to allow customers of participating banks to make purchases in-store or online, pay bills and move directly through P2P transfers irrespective of the phone type- smartphone or feature phones, especially through their banking apps.
Also, Access Bank, Ecobank, United Bank for Africa and Zenith Bank will go live with mVisa in the coming weeks. Nigeria is the first market to provide customers the convenience of making cross-border payments using mVisa.
By downloading the mVisa app on either a smart or feature phone, a consumer can then link that device to any type of Visa account — debit, credit or prepaid. Once the app is active, consumers can initiate a transfer of funds to a merchant, utility or individual mVisa account holder. Transactions are processed via Visa’s global network, VisaNet.
He said, “Small and medium merchants in particular, no longer have to invest in expensive point of sale infrastructure as mVisa gives them the freedom to accept payments in a convenient, secure and affordable manner that their customers trust.”
“We are very excited to see more and more merchants come on board every day as they begin to understand the benefits that mVisa brings, including real-time notifications of payments and access to sales and transactions history. We have campaigns lined up for the coming months to support our merchants and encourage new customers to experience mVisa at various locations across Nigeria.” Torre said
Visa Targets Mass Mobile Payment Market with mVisa
He said with the eyes on mass mobile money market, mVisa will become the best way to pay, available to anyone cross merchants, communities in Nigeria.
“In fully to live to our brand promise, we needed to digitise the commerce space. mVisa encompasses mobile form factor, digital banking and low cost acceptances. Digital banking has been out there, as our banks are operating on it. But we are embedding the architecture to it. The most interesting thing is low cost acceptance. The small market seller should find it easy and convenient to make and accept payments.
Merchants on mVisa
Merchants already on the platform include but not limited to DSTV, Genesis, hardRock, PayU, Quickteller, Konga, SPAR, while payment service providers are Flutterwave, Interswitch, Innovectives.
Digital Disruptions
According to Uttam Nayak, senior vice president, Digital Solutions at Visa, the app, will engender peer to peer (P2) e-payment innovation as money transactions, bill payments and shopping (P2M) are witnessing high levels of innovations to attract consumers.
“Front-end innovation is facilitating the gradual decline in use of conditional banking channels and migration into other payment options- priority mobile payment. Such developments are forcing traditional players to improve their technology platform and operations to be agile and develop innovative capabilities,” Nayak said.
He said that the value proposition of non-traditional players like mVisa is real-time capabilities and settlement.
The mVisa implementation in Nigeria benefited from the Visa Developer Platform, which allowed all partner banks the ability to integrate the mVisa APIs directly into their mobile banking apps.
While rolling out a new solution with a bank typically can take a very long time from development to implementation and testing, utilizing the Visa Developer Platform interface reduced the time taken significantly. This helped to speed up the number of banks who have been able to roll out the mVisa solution in Nigeria.
mVisa is now live in Nigeria, Kenya, India, Rwanda and Egypt with plans to launch across Africa.
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