Visa Set To Offer Person-To-Person Payments In The US

I bet that most of the people out there are like me where you rarely have cash and tend to use your debit card or credit card to pay for everything. The catch with that is if you need to pay an individual for something you need cash to do it a lot of the time. Visa has announced that a new system is coming to the US that will allow individuals to directly pay another Visa account holder at the point of sale. It sounds a lot like PayPal to me.

The new service is coming out of an agreement with CashEdge and Fiserve, which are two of the leading providers of electronic person-to-person payments, account transfer, and bill payment services. The agreement allows the two firms to access the VisaNet enabling them to integrate Visa personal payment into the person-to-person platform.

The bank an individual uses will need to be a participant in the system to send the money. According to Visa the participating bank will be able to select a Visa account number as the destination for funds when making a personal payment. The recipient's 16-digit Visa account, email, or mobile number will be used to pay them directly. Visa expects the service to be available to customers by the second half of 2011.