NFC payments in Latin America to be pioneered by Visa

[img_assist|nid=11099|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=66|height=100]In Guatemala the world’s leading credit card company Visa is launching Latin America's first contactless mobile payments trial program in collaboration with Banco Industrial and Banco Uno. Within the frames of the pilot program that will last for 6 months the credit card data of over 200 Visa customers will migrate to their mobile devices. NFC provisioning software will be provided by Silicon Valley-based ViVOtech while payments will be processed by VisaNet Guatemala.

As a part of the pilot participants will be allowed to make small value purchases at hundreds of merchants across the country. They will just have to tap their handsets against specially equipped ViVOpay 5000 payments readers.

As Michael Mullagh, CEO, ViVOtech, notes the initiative can cause increased penetration of banking and financial services into large under-banked populations that have hundreds of millions of mobile users.

Earlier in September Visa announced its plans to partner 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 said to be accessible through all Brazilian mobile carriers, with VisaNet Brasil running the deployment of the technology.