Strategic Alliance Enables Collaboration among Mobile Network Operators, Financial Institutions and Visa; Accelerates Delivery of Mobile Financial Services
BARCELONA, Spain--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun. 23, 2009--
Visa Inc. (NYSE: V), the world’s largest retail electronic payments
network1, and NeuStar (NYSE: NSR), a trusted interconnection
service provider to many of the world’s leading wireless network
operators, today announced a strategic alliance designed to accelerate
the adoption of mobile financial services globally.
Leaders in their respective industries, Visa and NeuStar share a
heritage of enabling complex, trusted transactions, and providing the
security and global interoperability that has enabled the growth of
electronic payments and mobile telecommunications, two industries that
now must collaborate in new ways. The alliance will combine 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 Visa-NeuStar alliance provides Visa a single point of connection to
mobile network operators around the globe and supports Visa’s global
strategy to extend its products and services to the mobile channel,”
said Elizabeth Buse, Head of Product at Visa Inc. “This initiative has
the potential to accelerate delivery of mobile financial services in
both emerging and developed economies. Those 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.”
NeuStar serves as a neutral intermediary to facilitate the safe and
reliable transfer of data between mobile operators, and other
collaborating parties in the delivery of mobile services to consumers.
NeuStar adds value by providing a single point of contact for all
services, simplifying the task for mobile operators and their partners
to connect and offer new services to their subscribers. NeuStar also
operates the GSMA’s PathFinder service, which provides a common global
addressing and service discovery mechanism for traditional communication
services, and is extensible to emerging services such as mobile money
transfer. PathFinder also provides a key enabling foundation for the
collaboration between operators and their chosen trading partners,
including other operators and financial services providers, such as Visa.
“NeuStar, Visa and our operator partners represent trusted brands, Visa
in payments and NeuStar in network data exchange, and operators in
mobile communications,” said Steve Edwards, Senior Vice President of
Converged Addressing Services at NeuStar. “This collaboration enables
network operators, financial institutions, Visa, and consumers to move
rapidly into the world of mobile payments and take advantage of the
exciting opportunities ahead. We look forward to joining Visa, financial
institutions, and mobile network operators in developing best practices
and applications for mobile financial services.”
Benefits and Applications
The Visa-NeuStar initiative will deliver a host of benefits to mobile
and financial services stakeholders globally by:
-
Enabling new channels through which Visa’s financial institution
clients can reach their customers when and where they are ready to use
mobile financial services
-
Creating new revenue streams by offering a new suite of financial
services such as mobile transaction alerts and offers
-
Enabling delivery of mobile financial services to consumers in
geographies with low penetration of payment products and financial
services. Those services may include mobile remote payments for
services such as bill payment and top-up for wireless airtime minutes
and mobile money transfer
-
Improving time to market for mobile financial services by providing
standardized and scalable infrastructure along with best practices for
mobile money applications
For example, mobile operators will now have the opportunity to combine
their data with information provided by a customer’s financial
institution in order to create more personalized and relevant offers
delivered by Visa’s mobile services to a subscriber’s mobile device.
This has the potential to increase subscriber response rates to offers
while increasing relevancy of messaging.
The collaboration will also enable the transfer of money to mobile
accounts using the Visa network. For example, the Visa network could
send funds to a mobile user’s account enabling the recipient to use
funds deposited for wireless top-up of prepaid airtime minutes or bill
payment for wireless services. The recipient may also access those funds
through a Visa prepaid card or withdrawal at a nearby ATM.
The combination of Visa and NeuStar technology may also make it possible
for operators to provide pertinent 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.
New Business Models through Collaboration Across Networks
As a result of the alliance, announced at the GSMA Mobile Money Summit
2009 today, 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 allowing Visa, financial institutions and
mobile operators to collaborate more closely and provide
information-rich transactions that can make mobile payment services more
personalized, functional, and secure.
About NeuStar
NeuStar (NYSE: NSR) provides market-leading and innovative services that
enable trusted communication across networks, applications, and
enterprises around the world. For more information, please visit www.neustar.biz.
About Visa Inc.
Visa (NYSE: V) operates the world's largest retail electronic payments
network providing processing services and payment product platforms.
This includes consumer credit, debit, prepaid and commercial payments,
which are offered under the Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink and PLUS
brands. Visa enjoys unsurpassed acceptance around the world and
Visa/PLUS is one of the world's largest global ATM networks, offering
cash access in local currency in more than 170 countries. For more
information, visit www.corporate.visa.com.
1 Based on payments volume, total volume, number of
transactions and total number of cards in circulation.
Source: Visa Inc.
For further information, press only:
Visa Inc.
Elvira
Swanson, 415-932-2564
globalmedia@visa.com
or
NeuStar
Marc
Abshire, 571-434-5151
marc.abshire@neustar.biz