Visa loses mobility director to Apple

Mary Carol Harris, former director of mobile for Visa Europe, has left the firm to take up a position at Apple.

Visa confirmed Harris is no longer with the financial services firm and will be succeeded by Visa’s head of commercial development, Jeremy Nicholds.

Harris, who previously worked for networking firm O2 UK, has been with Visa since 2008, and worked on projects such as mobile payment solutions and promoting the importance of NFC.

The payments firm predicted in 2012 that half of UK Visa payments will be made through mobile devices by 2020 due to the adoption of mobile wallets.

Since then, Visa has made several advancements in the mobile payments space as smartphone penetration continues to rise.

Contactless payments are on the increase, and more than 90 million purchases were made with Visa contactless cards in the UK last year.

MasterCard has given European retailers a deadline of 2020 to ensure all point of sale (POS) systems are contactless-payment enabled.

Mobile wallets and NFC payments are also on the increase, with one million people registering for Paym in its first 100 days and PayPal launching touch payment SDK for mobile apps.

Last year, Visa and Samsung announced a partnership to accelerate the development of near-field communication (NFC) mobile payments.

Visa also announced it will expand its V.me digital wallet into eight new regions by the end of this year, enabling more customers to pay for goods with their mobile phone if they are customers of participating bank branches.

With the recent announcement of Apple Pay on the firms NFC enabled iPhone 6, Harris has the appropriate skills needed for a project combining payments and mobile for NFC enabled devices.