NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, August 22, 2016

Visa plans to launch its mVisa mobile-payment solution in Nigeria before the end of 2016, according to Finextra.

Though no launch date has been announced, Visa is in “advanced discussions” with major Nigerian banks. mVisa, which launched in India last August, is primarily an in-store payment method, allowing users to pay for goods or services by scanning a QR code on a smartphone or entering a merchant identifier into their feature phones. However, the wallet also allows users to make domestic peer-to-peer (P2P) payments and access cash without an ATM network.

Conditions in Nigeria are well suited for a product like mVisa to take off. Mobile money is primarily used by and popular among mobile phone users in developing countries that don’t have easy access to a bank account. Nigeria is one such market — just 44%of adults had a bank account in 2014, but around 94% had a mobile phone, just under one-third of which are smartphones.

mVisa will work with all 150 million phones in the country, according to Finextra. It’s likely that the product will be popular among these users, but integrated smartphone functionality and the Visa branding could also spur adoption among existing Visa customers looking for a convenient payment option.