Visa will launch its V.me digital wallet this fall, but only in three European regions, at least at first.
Specifically, the service will launch in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, Visa said. Visa said that its U.K. launch will be assisted by payments processor MobilePay, it said.
Visa, which has said that that its mobile wallet will be facilitated through its partner banks, said that it would announce those banks later.
"V.me sits at the heart of Visa's future of payments," said Mariano Dima, executive vice president of product and marketing solutions at Visa Europe, in a statement. "For the first time, consumers and retailers will have a streamlined online checkout experience through an acceptance mark that offers industry-leading security and, when a Visa card is used in a V.me wallet, the same protection and rights that come with any Visa card transaction."
Visa refers to its V.me program as a digital wallet, not a mobile digital wallet - a key distinction. Visa claims that V.me will enable click-to-buy on a computer, touch-to-buy for a mobile browser, and wave-to-buy for physical point-of-sale NFC transactions. Rivals, such as Google Wallet, have been primarily oriented around mobile transactions, although Google required all attendees to its Google I/O conference to purchase tickets via Google Wallet.
Visa hasn't said when the V.me digital wallet program will roll out within the United States. When it does, however, it will compete with the Isis partnership of carriers here. Isis, a joint venture by three U.S. carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) will offer a mobile wallet, in much the same way that Google Wallet will. Isis will only roll out in Austin, Tex., and Salt Lake City, Utah. On the other hand, it will work with virtually all major credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover, and Isis added Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard in February.
Google Wallet launched last year, offering just a single carrier (Sprint, which hasn't joined Isis), a single bank (Citi) and, at the time, a single phone. Recently, Sprint added three new phones to the Google Wallet service: the Galaxy Nexus, LG Viper 4G LTE, and LG Optimus Elite.
But in April, one of the co-founding engineers behind Google Wallet, Rob von Behren, left Google to join payment provider Square, indicating that Google Wallet may have lost some momentum.
In November, Visa announced the branding for V.me, while launching a developer program. The APIs it developed included tools for Visa account validation, currency conversion, transaction initiation, and anti-money laundering tools, it said.
Visa has qualified the Samsung Galaxy SII, LG Optimus NET NFC, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Bold 9790, BlackBerry Curve 9360 and BlackBerry Curve 9380, among others, for Visa transactions.
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