Visa customers will be able to send and receive funds.

Visa announced Wednesday a personal payments service that will allow U.S. customers to send and receive funds to any eligible Visa credit, debit or prepaid account anywhere in the world.

To be able to offer the new service, Visa enhanced its global payments processing network, VisaNet. The company also announced a partnership with person-to-person payment providers CashEdge and Fiserv, which will integrate their platforms (Popmoney and ZashPay) with VisaNet.

In practice, customers will be able to send funds from their bank account to a recipient’s Visa account by entering their 6-digit Visa account, e-mail address or mobile phone number.

Previously, Visa had offered personal payments outside of the U.S. With this new service, Visa moves one step further into PayPal territory, which does have the benefit of covering debit and credit accounts of payment companies other than Visa.

Recently, Visa teamed up with Bank of America to offer mobile payments to New Yorkers. It also started offering local deals through its iPhone app and launched a network for small business owners on Facebook.

Via Mashable