The new offering by Visa brings together the necessary parties in the mobile payments ecosystem and lays the foundation for financial services providers and mobile network operators to securely and efficiently link Visa payment accounts to smart phones, while also offering a solution to manage those accounts post activation.

Working with Oberthur Technologies gives Visa access to technology that delivers Visa payWave, Visa’s contactless payment technology, and other payment applications “over the air” to a consumer’s NFC-equipped smart phone, along with the secure credentials needed to authenticate the consumer.

The new solution addresses a need for Visa account issuers, mobile operators and others who want to enable mobile payments at scale. The next stage of the product, an interconnectivity “hub,” will enable frictionless “many-to-many” interactions avoiding the need for parties to form bilateral commercial and technical relationships, even for entities using other TSM solutions.

How does it work?

For consumers the service will include support for Visa and non-Visa payment, loyalty or mass transit applications on their smart phone. Because of the nature of the technology, consumers could, for example, use their mobile phone to download the appropriate mass transit application to pay for a subway ride in a distant city.

A typical consumer experience to provision a smart phone for payments may include the following steps:

• The consumer purchases an NFC-equipped mobile phone that has passed Visa’s compliance testing, from their choice of operator
• The consumer contacts the financial institution that issued their Visa account, or responds to an offer from a service provider or operator, asking to activate mobile payments with their smart phone

• Visa’s mobile provisioning solution links the appropriate parties and begins the process of provisioning the mobile phone for payment.

  It authenticates the account holder by requesting the user enter a passcode, facilitate the exchange of secure “keys” among the parties that unlock the NFC-enabled chip on the smart phone and then initiates the secure download of payment account information to the device.

Intel, with its Atom-based smart phones and tablets, has agreed to use Visa’s global provisioning service to enable mobile subscribers to securely download payment account information to NFC-enabled devices.