Visa and Montise form mobile joint venture in India

Visa Inc. and Montise plc have formed a joint venture to offer a range of mobile-financial services to consumers in India.

The unnamed new company will build a technology platform to accelerate delivery of mobile-financial services, including banking, bill payment, mass-transit ticketing and cellular telephone top ups, officials of both companies announced.

India is the world's second-largest mobile market with an estimated 58 million mobile phone subscriptions as of March 31, 2010, say officials of Visa, which is based in San Francisco.

The joint venture is designed to facilitate the move from cash to digital currency, which is money or scrip that is exchanged electronically by computer networks.

"Creating this joint venture is a crucial step that can help expand the acceptance of digital currency in India and enable the migration of $700 billion of annual consumer spending from cash to electronic forms of payments," Elizabeth Buse, Visa group executive for international, said in a statement.

Alastair Lukes, Montise CEO, said the size of India's mobile market offers tremendous growth opportunities for the joint venture.

Visa is the world's largest payments company, and London-based Montise has created mobile money networks, enabling consumers of multiple banks and mobile operators to perform banking and payment transactions from their cellular phones.