(By Nikhil Pahwa & Vikas SN) Added more information on USSD and forthcoming mobile apps below It's taken them around an year and half to do this, but Movida, the joint venture between Visa and UK based mobile payments solutions provider, Monitise, has closed a second deal. The timeline isn't very impressive: Movida was launched in May 2010, signed an agreement with HDFC Bank in Feb 2012, and now, in July 2013, has inked a deal with ICICI Bank. On a positive note, Movida now has two of India's largest private sector banks as partners, and offers their customers the ability to pay bills, top up prepaid airtime and buy movie tickets via USSD (only for GSM customers) and a voice portal. While Movida is backed by Visa, it supports all mobile networks, and both Visa and non-Visa cards. Earlier this year, Uttam Nayak, Group Country Manager for India & South Asia, Visa, had alleged that its mobile payments service was been restrained by Indian telcos and had claimed that telcos were selectively offering USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) service to a few banks while they were refusing the same service to Visa since the service competes with its own services like Bharti Airtel’s Airtel Money and Vodafone’s m-Paisa service. Nayak had then claimed that telcos had blocked USSD access to them for one year, while COAI (Cellular Operators Association of India) had denied these claims, saying none of its member companies had blocked the USSD channel. We have contacted Visa on the current status of this issue, although a new deal with ICICI indicates that…
