NeuStar and Visa partner for mobile payment services

Today at the GSMA Mobile Money Summit 2009 Visa Inc., the world’s largest retail electronic payments network, and NeuStar, a trusted interconnection service provider to many of the world’s leading wireless network operators, declared a strategic alliance to speed up the adoption of mobile financial services globally.

The alliance will unite the reliability, scale and security of Visa’s global payment network with NeuStar’s carrier grade infrastructure which provides critical interconnection services to global network operators and their partners enabling seamless delivery of mobile services to consumers worldwide. The services include mobile payments, wireless top-up of prepaid accounts, money transfer, value-added services such as alerts and offers and mobile acceptance of electronic payments.

Besides, the transfer of money will be able to mobile accounts using the Visa network. The combination of Visa and NeuStar technology may also make it possible for operators to provide relevant data regarding handset capabilities. Visa could then detect phone make, model, screen size, browser type, and multimedia capabilities to intelligently tailor the user experience for that handset.

As a result of the alliance, NeuStar and Visa are committing resources to support development of commercially viable programs to support new application use cases. The initiative is also designed to enable a more robust set of mobile payment services by letting Visa, financial institutions and mobile operators collaborate more closely and provide information-rich transactions that can make mobile payment services more personalized, functional, and secure.