Safaricom's M-Pesa, Visa offer virtual card for global transactions

FILE PHOTO: An artist works on a mural advocating for retail M-Pesa mobile phone cashless payments in Nairobi, Kenya April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

NANYUKI, Kenya (Reuters) -M-Pesa, the mobile phone-based African money transfer service owned by Kenya's Safaricom Plc, and Visa Inc launched a virtual payment card on Thursday in a bid to capture some of the continent's $40 billion-a-year subscriptions market.

The M-Pesa Global Pay Visa Virtual card will allow users to securely pay 100 million foreign merchants like Amazon and Alibaba from their mobile phones, without the need for credit cards or accounts with processors such as PayPal.