The Visa-promoted Movida mobile payments platform will go live next
month with the second largest private sector lender HDFC Bank as its
banking partner, a Visa top official has said.
"Movida will go live
next month...on HDFC Bank it should be live. Other banks are in the
pipeline," says Visa Country Manager for India and South Asia Uttam
Nayak.
The work of integration and testing is on at present, before the product goes live, he said.
Movida,
an equal joint venture between Visa and the LSE-listed mobile banking
solutions company Monitise, had in February this year announced a tie-up
with HDFC Bank for the platform.
The product is pitted against
the interbank mobile payment service (IMPS) launched by the National
Payments Corporation of India, which already has 50 banks as members.
Nayak
said even though it is starting up with only HDFC Bank, the company is
in talks with other lenders to grow the network of banks as the solution
is designed for inter-bank operability.
He, however, declined to give any names or the number of banks the company is in talks with.
Nayak
said to start with, HDFC Bank account-holders will be able to do
"remote" transactions like money transfer to other account-holders,
mobile payments and ticketing, while the next phase will involve
"face-to-face" transactions like merchant payments.
When asked about IMPS, he said, Movida will be competing with the NPCI platform, but it has some differences.
The
IMPS is an account-to-account transfer of money and requires a special
registration, while the Movida solution will allow for a card-to-card
transfer of cash using the mobile platform, he said.
Nayak said
that NPCI's IMPS being the entrenched player has got an advantage in the
sphere, but the market opportunity to be tapped is very large which
gives space to newer players as well.