Visa takes on PayPal with personal payment system

If you are one of those who never have cash on you, this could be just the thing. The new payment system from Visa will let you transfer money to someone using their email, phone number or Visa account number – and it will work regardless of whether you have a credit, debit or pre-pay account at Visa.

It’s kicking off in the US first, and only with selected partners, but it seems Visa is keen to grab a slice of the personal payments market. Until now this has been dominated by PayPal.

Visa is doing this in collaboration with CashEdge and Fiserve, two of the leading providers of electronic person-to-person payments. Visa expects the service to be available to customers by the second half of 2011. There is no news on cost yet, but Visa has been running its system overseas since 2005 with more than 70 banks participating in countries such as Australia, China, India, Russia and Singapore.