Electronic payment giant Visa claims the mobile money market is poised to go mainstream as the industry begins to accept that open and interoperable services are key to global commercial success. “There is a real critical mass of closed-loop mobile money operations around the world; there are literally hundreds of deployments of mobile money schemes,” comments Niki Manby, head of emerging products for Visa’s Asia Pacific, Central Europe, Middle East & Africa regions, in an exclusive new interview with Mobile World Live. “But what’s happened recently and what we’ll see in the very near term is the realisation among these mobile money schemes that there is a need to connect more broadly than just the consumers and the participants in those networks.”