Visa Inc. is to make the mobile phone an important financial tool

Visa Inc. plans to turn into the mobile phone into a powerful financial tool. In order to do so it offers its first commercial application to link handsets with U. S. payment cards. Various financial applications were tested by the company in the U.S. and elsewhere. And it is about to offer a special tool allowing people to manage their credit and debit cards through phones that use Google Inc.’s Aroid operating system. 

The Visa Mobile for Android application offers transaction alerts, marketing offers, and location services. Initially it will work only with cards issued by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The experts consider that Visa is able to improve mobile financial solution because it has both a long-term vision and a plan to make the mobile phone a widely used banking device. 

However, the first step for the Visa Inc. is to provide the exclusivity of new solution. So for the next four months Visa plans to offer the application exclusively to customers of JPMorgan Chase. After the period of exclusivity the company is interested in offering new system to other issuers in the United States. It is expected that new system will help consumers to use their phones to store information about multiple card accounts and to initiate transactions at the point of sale or online.

Visa started offering the application last week through Google's Android Market, the online service that lets consumers download applications to their Android phones.
Visa Mobile for Android provides three services to the handset, she said: alerts and notifications sent by Visa, marketing offers from its merchant partners, and an integrated locator function that links a phone's GPS system with the Google Maps service.

The process of downloading the application is simply to use. Users enroll their cards by entering the account number and other information. Users also can set preferences such as thresholds for alerts.