The new mVisa platform allows consumers to safely purchase goods with their phones and lowers costs for retailers implementing cashless, electronic payments.

Visa has launched a new electronic payments platform for mobile users, called mVisa. It aims to allow both smartphone and feature phone users to purchase goods easily in-store and with more confidence about the secutity of the transaction. To make a purchase, smartphone users will scan a QR code  at the point of sales and then input the transaction amount. The merchant then verifies the sale. Visa has signed up partners in Nigeria including DStv, Genesis Cinemas, Spar, and Hard Rock Café. The system comes 10 months after the launch MasterCard and Ecobank’s Masterpass mobile payment service.

In Africa, the mVisa platform has already been launched in Kenya, where it competes directly with mPesa, as well as Rwanda and Egypt. It is also due to launch in Ghana in 2017. Globally, it has been launched in India and is being rolled out in Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Vietnam.

If successful, mVisa and other cashless mobile payment platforms are likely to leapfrog debit cards entirely. A 2015 study by Nigerian payment processing organisation NIBSS found that nine out of ten adults in Lagos State had a bank account and seven out of ten owned a credit or debit card, usage was very low. Only one in ten adults used their payment card daily. Just over a third used their card weekly and most people preferred to use their cards for low value payments below N1,000 ($3).  Nearly half of consumers wanted better security. Nobody used their cards in the open market, leaving a yawning gap in the traditional market for cashless payments.

Mastercard’s Mobile Payments Readiness Index notes that “Nigerian consumers [have a] strong desire for mobile to replace the insecurity and volatility of cash and barter” but also summarises that “Nigeria is not a hospitable place for mobile payments.”