Friday, January 27, 2012

The new Visa card for emerging markets - applicable rules for a different market

Digital payments are difficult to deploy in emerging markets where cash-transactions accounts for the majority of payments. Furthermore, it is even more difficult to connect digital payment solutions to global payment networks, like Visa. This is because the rules and regulations controlling global payment systems have evolved with the realities of first world markets in mind.

Deploying these rules in emerging markets are difficult because of major differences in laws, subscriber behaviour and availability of infrastructure. What is needed is a fresh look at the rules that dictate global payment products. To re-think the rules and re-define them in the context of emerging markets.

The new Visa product (mobile pre-paid) (Read here) recently announced attempts to do just that. It is a fully fledged Visa product, but with a re-worked hand-book where the rules have been re-defined to cater for emerging markets. I would not like to comment on how well this has been done, as I am directly involved, but believe that it should be reported on in this blog.

2 comments:

Frans Stander said...

Credit goes to the South African based company, which had now been acquired by VISA, and which had already deployed the solution into more than 20 counties...

Unknown said...

The Visa announcement still does not give enough detail on how this is going to be achieved.

v.me looks sleek and probably a lot of awesome stuff will be built on a platform provided by Visa.

I think for the emerging markets Visa is better off at providing a platform rather than providing solutions that is especially true in Africa where there is a lot of diversity of approaches in the fight against cash