Today, Visa revealed the launch of its all new plug-and-play mobile money platform, which it has developed to help make the process of offering financial services to customers both more simple and cost-efficient for financial institutions and mobile operators. Reportedly, this is the world’s first ever bank-grade managed service for mobile money, which The Financial Post explains as meaning that “it allows Visa to host and fully manage all aspects of a mobile money program on behalf of the provider.”

So what does this entail? Everything from user interface design to consumer enrollment to transactions processing and authorization, the report continues, adding that it can enable both domestic-only and globally interoperable mobile money services.

Specifically designed to be used by financial institutions and mobile operators, the company’s platform is fully complementary in that it complies with the regulatory frameworks established for such mobile financial services, The Financial Post notes. By providing them with a local connection to its global payment network, VisaNet, Visa is essentially offering an innovative, “one-stop shop” for providing money mobile services as based on its “high standards of security, reliability and interoperability.”

Visa is committed to delivering on its promise as a true thought-leader in the mobile payment space, as it beams on its website, “Combining mobile communications and electronic payments holds the promise of democratizing financial services for billions worldwide, putting secure, reliable and convenient mobile payments and financial services in the palm of one’s hand…The convergence of the Internet and mobile technologies are creating new demands for electronic payments. Today, consumers want the ability to easily pay online, via mobile phone or in social networking/gaming environments.” And Visa is there to offer them just that.

VisaNet comes fully stocked with a variety of ways in which users can conduct money transactions, including USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), xHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and IVR, or interactive voice response technology.

As of right now, consumers in India and Rwanda are going to be the first to enjoy this service – specifically, Aircel (News - Alert) mobile subscribers in India and customers of Bank of Kigali and Urwego Opportunity Bank in Rwanda, writes the Financial Post. These consumers are able to access the mobile payment service as hosted in Visa’s managed data centers, which are built on Fundamo’s (News - Alert) technology, which was acquired by Visa back in 2011 and has been successfully deployed worldwide.

“We applaud the pioneers in Africa, Asia and the Middle East who have launched closed-loop mobile financial services and reached so many consumers so quickly,” commented Bill Gajda, head of Global Mobile Products for Visa Inc. “As demand grows, so does the cost and complexity to maintain these services. Visa’s new mobile money platform is designed to allow mobile operators and financial institutions to focus on their core business, while leaving the management of their mobile money service to Visa.”