With enhancing its global payment processing network and buddying up with two P2P technology providers, Visa Inc. is tightening its claws on expanding its payment prowess to soon allow consumers to pay one another, historically PayPal’s turf.

Visa announced today it inked two deals with CashEdge Inc. and Fiserv Inc. in order to offer personal payments capability, which will soon work on any eligible Visa credit, debit or prepaid account anywhere in the world. Though Visa offers personal payments to other countries, this marks the first time personal payments will be available to America.  Visa said it expects the first U.S. FIs to make Visa personal payments available to their customers by the second half of 2011.

“For fifty years, Visa has worked to simplify payments at the merchant point of sale; we are now evolving our network capability to make it easier for our account holders to pay one another,” said Jim McCarthy, global head of products at Visa, in a statement.

Visa’s new feature will work by granting participating FIs’ customers the option to choose Visa as the destination of funds for payments by entering the recipient’s 16-digit Visa account, email address or mobile phone number.

With the U.S. mobile P2P market forecasted to grow, we suspect other players should surface to join the personal payments bandwagon and bring new functionality to the American market. Indeed, Fiserv also let it leak in a release that “real-time payments will be available in 2011” for its P2P product, ZashPay, the service that’s integrated with Visa. As it stands now, payments can be sent to an U.S. bank account “in as little as one business day” through ZashPay.