Visa trying to consolidate mobile banking

KARACHI:

Visa’s Brad Jones has been working out ways to help people use banking services through their mobile phones since 2007, a fairly long time in the mobile banking industry, and is impressed with the development of the sector in the country.

In an interview with The Express Tribune, the Visa mobile innovation director, responsible for all mobile-related activity in West and North Africa, Middle East and Pakistan, said, “I have been to a lot of mobile money businesses around the world, but what is happening here is the cutting edge.”

Talking about branchless banking, Jones went as far as saying Pakistan was leading the world in terms of what was happening here.

“Our vision is to enable connections between current and future schemes. We want to allow money transfer across schemes and enable businesses to be interoperable, so money deposits and withdrawals are not restricted to a particular location or scheme,” he explained.

Jones is excited about the possibility of such a situation and believes that once this inter-operability occurs, the size of businesses will start to grow as schemes will expand their merchant base significantly. “This is the future of mobile money in Pakistan and we see Visa playing a very important role in providing this interoperability,” he asserted.

Interoperability is the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems without special effort on the part of the customer.

According to Jones, one of the key enablers for mobile money is markets where there is high level of texting, as people are comfortable with putting data into their phones. “When you see most of the mobile transactions being conducted on such money schemes, they are done with ease and users face no hassle due to high usage of mobile phones,” he explained.

Jones informed that the first mobile money scheme was launched in the Philippines, which is the heaviest texting market in the world. According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the Pakistani market is currently the fourth largest.

Narrating the experience of witnessing a UBL Omni transaction, Jones pointed out that such schemes were gaining popularity among local merchants. “There are people who have never experienced banking before, but as part of the financial network through mobile banking, they now have the opportunity to generate revenue by providing a service that people need in the community,” he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 19^th, 2011.