Visa is getting into the personal payments game and will soon allow Visa account holders to send and receive funds directly to or from other Visa account holders. The company announced on Wednesday that it had made enhancements to VisaNet (Visa's payment processing network) in order to enable new transactions between customers, adding that it also struck deals with CashEdge and Fiserv to integrate the new service into their respective platforms.

From the sound of it, Visa's new system will require some involvement from your financial institution before you can send or receive funds. Customers who do frequent a participating bank will be able to enter someone's 16-digit Visa account number, phone number, or e-mail address in order to send the funds directly to that account. Visa notes that financial institutions outside the US can already do this (once again reminding us why banking in the US is so awesome—not), but that this will be the "first time a major payment network has introduced a global requirement for account issuers to accept incoming funds and thus enable a new generation of personal payment services."

It's a new move for Visa, but a new generation of personal payment? Not so much. PayPal has been facilitating payments between individuals for more than a decade now and is still by far the most well-known personal payment system. There are also more recent offerings, such as Venmo and Square, the latter of which has been exploding in popularity since last year and has replaced PayPal for many users.

The benefit to the services mentioned above is that they are all account agnostic—it doesn't matter whether you have accounts with Visa, American Express, Bank of America, ING Direct, or any other financial institution. And, of course, many banks now offer their own person-to-person payments—for example as a Chase customer, I can electronically send funds from any of my accounts to another Chase account holder instantly.

Visa says its payment system won't be available until the second half of 2011, making today's news even less interesting. Without a service to play with today, Visa risks people forgetting that it even exists by the time it's launched. Meanwhile, all the aforementioned alternatives will continue facilitating payments between users like they always have—Square recently told Ars that the company was seeing 100,000 new account signups every month, and PayPal claims to have almost 95 million registered users.

Speaking of which, PayPal didn't comment directly on the Visa news, but its parent company eBay told the Wall Street Journal that it doesn't feel threatened. "As the leader in global online payments for the last twelve years, PayPal has unmatched advantages that we believe put us ahead of the competition," the company said." PayPal connects to 57 different financial networks and 15,000 local banks in 190 markets—not just in the Visa network, but with payment methods that meet our customers’ preferences in markets around the world.”