NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Visa plans to buy the payments and ticketing unit of U.S.-based chip company Rambus for $75 million, as the payments network seeks to expand tokenization beyond Visa cards, including to bank accounts used for real-time payments, as well as to transactions processed by domestic networks.
Visa’s planned acquisition, which was announced Tuesday, also would give it more tokenization technology that could be used for mobile, e-commerce and blockchain payments, as well as technology for host card emulation-based mobile ticketing.
Rambus had acquired the payments and ticketing unit that Visa is buying in early 2016, when it bought former Netherlands-based mobile payments vendor Bell ID and sister company Ecebs of the UK. Rambus paid a total £64.7 million for the vendors, around US$92.2 million at the time.