October 18, 2010Mobile Payment Technology - What is Visa plan?The card giant did $4.8 trillion in transactions last year. So why are they scared of your cellphone? And why do upstarts like Bling Nation and Paypal get under their skin? Visa's Mobile Payments Plan - Forbes.com William Gajda earns his living helping Visa adapt to new technologies. Last month when he left his wallet in a New York taxicab he learned just how powerful those new technologies can be. He'd paid for the cab with his Visa card, so he had Visa's technicians track down the cabbie. By then, though, the card was gone. Just as Gajda gave up hope, he found out that his billfold was safe. But it wasn't Visa's global network of data centers that helped him track it down. It was a stranger via Facebook. That kind of change is unnerving to Visa, despite its formidable successes. Since going public two years ago the San Francisco company has been nearly everywhere investors want it to be. Its 1.8 billion cards made 66 billion retail transactions worth $4.8 trillion worldwide last year. In June Visa owned 57% of the combined U.S. credit and debit card markets, compared with 53% in 2007 says The Nilson Report; MasterCard ( MA - news - people ) had 25%. Operating revenues grew 10% to $6.9 billion in Visa's 2009 fiscal year. Net income was $2.4 billion. A host of upstarts with Dr. Seuss names like Boku, Obopay and Zoompass don't care and think they might have Visa's number. Their idea: If we can use the world's 5.8 billion mobile phones for mail, movies and messages, why not for money, too? "I hear all the time that we're dinosaurs," says Gajda, "and that we should just make room for the new guys."
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