Visa will roll out its V.me online payment service early next year. The company, which announced plans for the service in March, has also launched a developer program to help merchants incorporate its payment systems into their web sites and other products.

Like PayPal and similar services from Google, Amazon and others, V.me will allow consumers to save their credit-card information and make purchases on sites that support the service without re-entering the data or sharing it with those merchants. The company also plans to add mobile services, donation tools and the ability to let individual users send and receive money.

As VentureBeat points out, competing with eBay-owned PayPal won’t be easy, even for a company with Visa’s large footprint and banking-industry clout:

Competitor PayPal is on pretty strong footing, however, with 12 million monthly users for virtual gaming goods. It has passed 100 million overall active users and raked in $1 billion for eBay in this year’s second quarter. Not to mention it has its own developer community, with a big push from eBay to pay attention to that community. The company formed X.Commerce, which has been slowly rolling out new ways for developers to play with eBay’s e-commerce solutions.

Visa launches PayPal competitor V.me with developer community to back it up [VentureBeat]
V.me [Official Site]

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