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Small denomination Visa payments not far in Mideast

Melanie Cameron, technologies manager for Middle East, Visa International, said that at present most of the banks are working towards providing loyalty and credit functions in the chip cards. But there is no end to what innovations banks can do with the chip cards.

The Middle East region has already 77,000 chip cards in circulation with UAE alone having 25,000. The acquiring banks are rolling out the Point Of Sale (POS) machines that will accept chip cards, while ATM migration has also began. In fact, there are now 5,500 POS chip terminals in the UAE.

Says Cameron that apart from providing the issuers a platform to provide a lot more value, chip cards are more secure for users. The security features are much more enhanced and leaves hardly any space for fraud.

In fact fraud has been one of the issues on the uppermost priority of Visa and this is one of the reasons that all purchases made through the Internet by Visa cards will have to go through Verified by Visa application from the beginning of next month as all merchants accepting payments by Visa through the Internet will have to sign up with the programme, she added.

It is expected that Verified by Visa will help increase the frequency with which cardholders use their payment cards over the Internet and is expected to reduce fraud arising from online transactions by at least 50 per cent.

Significantly following an agreement signed with MasterCard and JCB, the Verified by Visa technology - known as 3D Secure - has now been adopted as a global standard for shopping on the Internet and this does bring in a lot of relief for users of card on the Internet.

It has been a multi-pronged approach from the payment association as on one hand it has been looking to provide the best security for users and on the other providing as many alternative solution to using cash. The focus is now gradually shifting towards providing different solutions using mobile phones and other devises and one of the solutions that now looks very possible is the transfer of money using the cellphones.

Visa is piloting this project in South Africa along with partners Absa, Vodacom and NamITech to provide a solution that has potential to soon see any Visa cardholder paying any other Visa cardholder, anywhere in the world, via their cellphones. The pilot is going to come to an end in May and the long-term outlook of such a solution could see Visa cardholders being eligible for the service, including Visa Electron, Debit or Credit cardholders.

Talking about the UAE, Cameron pointed out that infrastructure in the country is very advanced and is ripe for introducing the latest innovations happening in the world of cashless payment. One such potential exists in paying the parking fees with cards issued by banks. She said that small denomination payment solution is an area that Visa would soon look to enter in the region and this would include payments of taxi bills through Visa cash applications among a host of others.