Verve Cards Goes Live in US, Europe

Verve International, an indigenous electronic payment card scheme has perfected arrangement that will enable its Verve card to be accepted at ATMs and point-of-sale (PoS) terminals in the US, Europe and other countries across the globe.

The move is part of plans to give Verve, a locally grown but world class card a global out local and expand the payments network.

Currently, most Nigerian Banks' cards do not work in a lot of ATMs and merchant sites where the cardholder would want to buy ebooks or software or anything online.

But Charles Ifedi, chief executive officer, Verve International said that his company has inked agreement with Discover Financial Services to allow Verve cardholders to have access Discover networks for international purchases and cash access outside of Nigeria.

Ifedi, told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that “We are going live in all ATMs in the US by November this year. This means that anybody that has Verve card issued in Nigeria and travels with it to US will be able to use it at all ATMs in the USA from November this year.

“We are implementing the project presently and I expect the completion by November, I also expect that by April next year Verve will go live in all ATMs in the United Kingdom as well,” he said.

According to him, the advantage of this partnership (with Discover) is that Discover has presence in 185 countries which makes it possible for us to be present in those countries with time.

“For now, we are starting with US and UK where most Nigerians visit” Ifedi added

He noted that Verve has two outlooks; Verve Nigeria Business and Verve International.

“Focus of Verve Nigeria business is to meeting the card need of Nigerians at home that don’t travel abroad. How many percentage of Nigerians travel abroad?It is about 20 percent and there are about 80 percent of Nigerians that don’t go anywhere. Verve Nigeria focus is on those 80% that don’t go anywhere, meet their entire card need”.

Ifedi also disclosed that Verve market share in the country’s e-payment space in terms of volume of cards is about 19 million cards as at the end of July this year, representing 58% of the number of cards issued in the country.

Another of its brand MasterCard/Verve is 2 million representing 6% of the market share.

It would be recalled that InterSwitch, a pioneer e-payment services provider in April this year created two additional companies from its original portfolio, these include, Verve Nigeria Business and Verve International which are now separate and independent businesses.

InterSwitch is now focusing on provision of infrastructure such as switching and processing.

The Company said it will now take its card-agnostic pure play switching services and third party transaction processing (Mastercard, Visa, Union Pay, Verve) capabilities across the region.

The firm said this move is part of its strategy to organize the next stage of sustainable growth in the firm by empowering the various businesses.

“It has always been our desire to evolve into an integrated payments holding business where the various parts of the business are driven to deepen and broaden their relationships with their various customers by creating innovative products and services of real value. Creating the right governance structure to herald this new phase of sustainable growth has been the focus of the board and management in the last few months,” the Company said.