Visa introduces card-to-card cash transfer system

Visa has launched a new person-to-person payment service that lets consumers transfer funds in near real-time to other cards over the VisaNet network.

The service was activated for the first time by Russia's largest payment kiosk operator, 1st Processing Bank (QIWI Group), and Ukraine's largest bank, PrivatBank earlier this week.

Visa is rolling the service out internationally, with a view to capturing market share from PayPal, and emerging mobile remittance platforms.

Senders simply provide their bank with the recipient's Visa card number to initiate the payment. Visa says the process does away with the need for senders to fill out complicated forms and provide routing information such as bank codes and branch addresses.

When processed through VisaNet, funds are credited directly to the eligible Visa credit, debit or prepaid account in minutes, freeing recipients from having to visit agent locations to collect cash.

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Comments: (4)

A Finextra member 25 February, 2011, 04:35

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This is a milestone towards enabling seamless P2P fund transfer globally. With all the required infrastructure already in place, I am sure it will pick up rapidly. The only limitations will be how soon Visa expands the services in global scale specially targeting migrant destinations. This can be a most economic mode of transferring funds for those migrant laborers.

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Adam Nybäck - Anyro - Stockholm 25 February, 2011, 08:01

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A step in the right direction that should have been made 20 years ago. Good that PayPal is around now to push innovation forward.

Does anyone know what the fees are for such transfers?

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A Finextra member 27 February, 2011, 20:11

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Nice service. Anybody have a link for the official announcement?

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Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 28 February, 2011, 08:38

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While the article doesn't explicitly say so, I'm assuming it refers to cross-border money transfer, since domestic transfers via credit cards have been in vogue in many countries (including India) for a few years now.

It would be instructive to get more details around the "last mile" and security of the transaction: Can the receiver opt to keep the received funds in his/her credit card account forever and offset it against other spends on the card? If not, how does s/he transfer it to their bank accounts? Hopefully the receiver needs to only divulge his/her credit card number to the sender, for few will be comfortable disclosing Name on Card, Expiry Date and CVV?