Visa buys Fundamo mobile wallet service

Visa is gaining ground in the mobile-payments market with the acquisition of Fundamo, a service that is already prevalent in at least 40 developing markets.

The merger brings together Fundamo's mobile financial services platform for customers with little to no access to a bank account with Visa's global payments network, VisaNet. Additionally, Visa has reaffirmed an agreement with Monitise, which offers new services — such as mobile payments, person-to-person payments and mobile transaction alerts — to Visa account holders on a mobile phone.

Visa has already announced plans for a near-field communication (NFC)-enabled digital wallet service for North America, set to launch in the autumn. MasterCard, meanwhile, has garnered attention for its involvement with the Google Wallet mobile-payment platform.

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Visa acquires Fundamo mobile payments service on ZDNet.com.