Visa Europe’s director of mobile, Mary Carol Harris, has jumped ship to join Apple, where she will lead the firm’s push into the mobile payments sector on the continent, according to finextra.com. Apple have also hired the former Visa Europe head of eCommerce & V.me – Duncan Olby….https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncanolby
Harris is an experienced digital payments expert with over 14 years of experience in a range of mobile payments, having launched some of the early SMS- and USSD-based m-payment services in developing markets and more recently mobile contactless (NFC) and other mobile payments across Europe.
A former head of NFC for Telefonica, Harris joined Visa in February 2008 as a senior manager in the card scheme’s mobile payments unit, working her way up the ranks. As director of mobile, Harris was responsible for commercialising Visa’s mobile propositions in Europe, including mobile contactless payments (NFC and all variants), and P2P payments.
Prior to that she spent two years as vice president, head of strategic alliances and projects in mobile, contactless and innovation. In this position she was responsible for building a new team from scratch in Visa to create new opportunities with mobile and digital players – including mobile network operators, handset manufacturers, OS and platform providers.
Her experience should prove invaluable as Apple seeks to secure the same level of European bank support for Apple Pay as it enjoyed for its US launch earlier this month, where big guns such as Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Capital One and Wells Fargo came out in support of the project.
Some finextra members believes that Harris was not a real valuable asset fo Visa Europe and considers that she won’t be missed.
„Aside from a Samsung powered Visa card for the Olympics, what else was really delivered from her team? Visa have spent millons on trying to convince us to move away from a card to a mobile and have failed spectacularly. With only one MNO in the UK offering such a product (and that’s based on MasterCard!) we are still in the same position as we were 4 years ago or more.”
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
