Visa is joining forces with MFS Africa to simplify remittances and expand global e-commerce across Africa.
Africa has pioneered mobile money, with the likes of M-Pesa in Kenya leading the way. However, without a virtual or physical network credential associated with them, many international online services are unavailable to users.
To help solve this problem, MFS Africa - Africa’s largest digital payments hub, connecting through one API more than 180 million mobile wallets on the continent - will distribute Visa payment credentials across more than 15 markets.
This will allow mobile money users connected to the MFS Africa platform to generate an instant Visa virtual card with a 16-digit number and link it to their mobile money accounts to use for remittances and e-commerce transactions.
MFS Africa will also integrate Visa’s real-time push payments platform, Visa Direct, to provide mobile money users a fast and secure way to send and receive money and remittances directly from and into their digital wallets via eligible card credentials.
“Africa is adopting a mobile-led, digital payments ecosystem and with Visa looking to accelerate the distribution of payment credentials and expand the acceptance space for digital payments, this partnership is an important one,” says Jack Forestell, chief product officer, Visa. “MFS Africa will help us enable digital payment use cases at scale through their aggregation model.”