Visa Europe has announced the launch of two new mobile payment services, Visa Mobile Person-to-Person (P2P) payments and Visa Alerts.

These services have been developed by Visa Europe in partnership with Monitise, a technology company delivering mobile banking, payments and commerce networks worldwide.

Visa Europe Chief Executive Peter Ayliffe thinks the way consumers pay is changing, driven by new technology and a demand for more flexible payment. “We are already seeing early adoption of mobile payments, and in the coming months we will see the arrival of mainstream NFC technologies, advanced loyalty and e-commerce services, and ultimately, the launch of a new digital wallet”, he says.

Visa Mobile P2P payments allow registered users to transfer funds to any Visa cardholder in Europe via an application installed on their smartphone. The app enables users to send money to an address book contact, to a mobile phone number, or to a specific Visa card number. Visa Alerts is a service that notifies in real-time to registered Visa cardholders whenever their card has been used to make a purchase or to withdraw cash through Visa Europe’s payment network. At launch Visa Mobile P2P payments will be available in Europe through an Android application. As Visa says the support for other mobile Operating Systems, multiple currencies and payments to and within non-European countries will be added over following months.

The European Commission has recently opened an antitrust investigation into the standardization process for e-payments started by the European Payments Council (EPC).

The EPC is the coordinating body of the European banking industry. The Council supports and promotes the creation of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), which is a self-regulatory project to create an integrated payments market within the EU. The Commission will start an examination of the standardization process to ensure that competition is not unduly restricted, for example through the exclusion of new entrants and payment providers who are not controlled by a bank.

Joaquín Almunia, Vice President of the European Commission and commissioner in charge of Competition Policy states: “Use of the internet is increasing rapidly making the need for secure and efficient online payment solutions in the whole Single Euro Payments Area all the more pressing. I therefore welcome the work of the European Payments Council to develop standards in this area. In principle, standards promote inter-operability and competition, but we need to ensure that the standardisation process does not unnecessarily restrict opportunities for non-participants.”

Isis, the joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, announced that HTC, LG, Motorola Mobility, RIM, Samsung Mobile and Sony Ericsson will introduce NFC-enabled mobile devices that implement Isis’ NFC and technology standards.

Isis is the carriers attempt do to enter the emerging mobile payments and mobile wallet market. The multi-manufacturer support will help Isis to compete against its rival Google Wallet. Currently, Google Wallet is only available on Sprint’s Nexus S 4G. Dale Sohn, president of Samsung Mobile, comments: “The key to widespread adoption of mobile commerce will be the broad availability of NFC-enabled handsets.” For Consumers without NFC-enabled smartphone, Isis is working with DeviceFidelity to add NFC functionality to the mobile device.

Paymentwall, the San Francisco-based monetization platform provider has announced the launch of its new service MobilePay+.

MobilePay+ combines thirteen mobile payment providers and creates one global mobile payment solution with complete global coverage. The payment providers are: Allopass, Atlas Interactive, Boku, BoxPay, DaoPay, Fortumo, ImpulsePay, MikroOdeme, Mobile First, Mopay, Smart Philippines, SMSCoin/Aggregator, and Zong. Honor Gunday, CEO of Paymentwall comments: “There’s a lot of competition in mobile payments, and many mobile providers are strong in specific regions and are constantly expanding coverage, but to achieve full global coverage, today, we combined 13 mobile payment solutions in 1. MobilePay+ now provides full global coverage and it also optimizes payouts and conversion rates using our price and conversion rate optimization algorithm.”

European online payment provider Ogone Payment Services has acquired E-Billing Solutions (EBS), India’s second largest online payment provider, for an undisclosed sum. This is Ogone’s first acquisition and its first move outside the European market. EBS retains its name and brand in the Indian market and will continue to operate under its current management structure and market approach.

Peter De Caluwe, CEO of Ogone Payment Services, said: “Only 8.4% of the Indian market is currently online but this translates to 100 million users which makes it the fourth largest online country in the world and this is set to grow rapidly with online travel accounting for 80% of the commerce in India. Acquiring a leading company such as EBS represents huge potential for us and our European merchants.”

Card.io, a mobile commerce company founded by two former AdMob employees, Mike Mettler and Josh Bleecher Snyder, launched a software development kit (SDK) for Android this week. The company’s free mobile payment solution allows consumers to process mobile payments without any extra hardware. Instead of entering the credit card information manually, it is retrieved automatically when the customer holds its card in front of the phones camera. For security reasons card.io doesn’t save the credit card data or image and uses a SSL encryption to communicate with its servers.

The solution is quite successful, since its iOS platform launch in June over 80 apps, including e-commerce, local, retail, ticketing, travel, and daily deal apps have integrated the card.io SDK. A major advantage over its competitors like Google Wallet or PayPal is that it does not require consumers to change their habits or hardware. The problem is that if mobile wallets succeed and put an end to physical cards it will also render optical readers obsolete.

The Smart Card Alliance has launched a new white paper: “The Mobile Payments and NFC Landscape: A U.S. Perspective.” The Smart Card Alliance is a not-for-profit industry association working to stimulate the understanding, use and widespread of smart card technology. The report provides a good overview of the mobile payments and NFC landscape in the U.S. and discusses advantages and disadvantages of different mobile payment approaches. It also summarizes the requirements of the merchant, consumer, issuer, and mobile operator for NFC mobile payments and evaluates how different mobile payment approaches fulfill overall market requirements.

The paper is available on the Smart Card Alliance Homepage.

Today, PAY.ON AG and payolution GmbH announced cooperation to market their payment services. PAY.ON systems enable payment providers online payment processing via a single interface and access to a network of connectors and payment schemes worldwide. Payolution provide solutions for merchants to offer payments by installments and invoice on the internet. The company was established last spring in Vienna and recently got acquired by Skrill. Both payment methods are connected to the PAY.ON gateway PayPipe and integrated into the platform PaySourcing as of now.

Markus Rinderer, PAY.ON CEO, says: “We are very happy to add the payolution payment solutions to our portfolio. The products are innovative, professional and flexible, which makes them a perfect fit for PAY.ON. We support our cooperation partners in their global market penetration. They gain access to international payment providers, who our partners can then appoint as resellers of their payment method.”

Luup, a mobile payment and financial service solution provider, has launched a universal mobile payment platform at Sibos 2011.

The launch is the result of the integration of the Temenos T24 core banking application and Microsoft BizTalk with Luup’s mobile payment services platform. Luup provides a managed mobile payment service for banks: ”Through Luup, banks have the opportunity to serve corporate and retail markets using a single universal mobile payments platform. They can now offer mobile payment services in developed and emerging markets anywhere in the world through any mobile device and on any network. This is an industry first.” says Martin Wilson, Luup CEO.

As Techrunch reports, American Express has acquired the virtual currency platform and in-game payment provider Sometrics for $30M. American Express plans to add Sometrics to Serve, its own digital payment and commerce platform launched in March 2011.

Sometrics runs an payment platform that allows publishers to monetize online games through virtual currency. Currently, the company is partnering with online gaming companies like PopCap, Bigpoint, Playdom, Nexon America, IMVU and many more.