Visa Prepares European Tokens And P2P Payments

Apple Pay is coming closer to reality in Europe as Visa prepares for a mid-April launch of  a tokenization service customized for the European marketplace.

The practice of swapping out a 16-digit credit card number with a basically meaningless token number is considered a necessary component in the future of payments security, and has been since Apple chose to make it the central security feature for Apple Pay.

Steve Perry, Visa Europe’s chief digital officer, noted in an interview that his firm’s plan for secure credit card data transmission parallels what Visa Inc offers in the United States. He declined to comment on whether Apple Pay had agreed to use Visa’s tokens in European markets.

“Apple and Visa (Inc) have an agreement around what has happened,” Perry said. “I am as excited as anyone, but we have to wait,” he added. The Visa Europe executive referred further questions to Apple.

Visa’s announcements this week were not all about tokens, however.  The firm has also announced an intention to create a peer-to-peer payment service that will allow users to transfer cash, in real time, using just a mobile phone number or Visa card number.

The service will be called Visa Direct and will supplant Visa Personal Payments, the existing P2P protocol with about 200K users in Europe. It will be hooked in to Facebook and Twitter to allow users to transfer funds between social media services.

Visa has additionally rolled out an API to make it easy for banks to integrate the service, and is geared for a summer 2015 launch.