Latin America's first contactless mobile payments pilot is being launched in Guatemala by Visa in conjunction with Banco Industrial and Banco Uno.
The six month trial - using NFC provisioning software from Silicon Valley-based ViVOtech - will see the credit card data of over 200 Visa customers migrated onto their mobile phones. VisaNet Guatemala will process payments.
Participants will be able to make small value purchases at hundreds of merchants around the country by tapping their handsets against specially equipped ViVOpay 5000 payments readers.
Michael Mullagh, CEO, ViVOtech, says: "NFC mobile payments have the potential to greatly increase the reach of banking and financial services into large under-banked populations that have hundreds of millions of mobile users."
In September, Visa outlined plans to work with Banco do Brasil to enable the bank's cardholders to pay with their mobile phone and confirm the transactions via text message. The service is accessible through all Brazilian mobile carriers, with VisaNet Brasil running the deployment of the technology.