Visa, one of the world's leading payment solutions providers, has announced the extension of the Visa Money Transfer service to millions of cardholders. With the launch of Visa Money Transfer in Indonesia and the expansion of a program in Singapore, Visa is making it easier and more secure for people in 13 countries in Europe, the Middle East including Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, and Asia to send and receive funds. Visa Money Transfer, a card-based service enabling a Visa cardholder to send funds conveniently and securely to another Visa cardholder, debuted in Ukraine in 2003. Since then, the service has been extended to tens of millions of people who no longer need to wait at a money transfer agent's office, but instead can use the convenience and security of their 16-digit Visa account number to send and receive money. Depending on their issuing bank, they can execute the transfer at a bank branch, using the internet, via an ATM or self-service kiosk. “Visa's growth has been the result of our commitment to finding innovative ways to use our network and products to make payments more secure and more convenient,” said Ihab Ayoub, general manager, Visa, KSA. “Our approach to person-to-person payments and remittances is to use our global technology to create tailored solutions for various countries and apply what we've learned to expand the service worldwide.” The demand for money transfer includes domestic remittances, person-to-person payments and remittances by expatriate workers who continue to have commitments in their home countries. The World Bank has reported that workers' remittances around the world were SR 900 billion in 2007.1 In addition to cardholder convenience, money transfer programs enable financial institutions to better meet the needs of their existing customers. Visa's goal is to utilize its global processing platform and payments network to make money transfer between the 1.6 billion Visa cards around the world safe, convenient and reliable. To this end, Visa is continually enhancing existing programs and developing new services. Work underway includes technology infrastructure improvements to support global processing of card-based remittances, and to open new channels through which remittances can be sent and received, including through financial institution branches, the internet, mobile devices and Visa's global ATM network. As a global company, operating the world's largest electronic payments network, Visa Inc. is uniquely positioned to deliver flexible services that meet the demand for money transfer services and to support the introduction of Visa Money Transfer service to new geographies in key domestic and cross-border money transfer corridors. __
