Wells Fargo and Visa team up for mobile payment tests
By Will Park on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 11:55 AM PST In Announcements, Partnerships, Services
Visa USA and Wells Fargo & Co. are teaming up for an experimental pilot program that will have up to 50 Wells Fargo employees paying for some products and services with their tricked-out (NFC?) mobile phones. Forget debit or credit cards, mobile phone wallets are the way to go!
If the pilot program proves successful, Wells Fargo may extend the trial to 300-500 of its current customers. Since customer tests won’t begin until fall of this year, we can infer that Visa’s mobile payment infrastructure won’t be up and full running until next year.
Everybody seems to be getting into mobile banking, but mobile payment systems are the real future. Americans aren’t too keen on moving around account funds from their mobile phones, but making a payment by swiping your mobile phone? Now, that’s something the US can really latch onto. It’s nice to see some industry big-hitters like Wells Fargo and Visa teaming up to help make mobile phone wallets a possibility. Swipe and go? We hope so.
[Via: Yahoo News]
I bet this will only give Visa an excuse to raise interchange fees even more, leading businesses to raise prices even more. Oh the cost of convenience. My organization, UnfairCreditCardFees.com would like to see these fees become more transparent. That’s certainly feasible.
Even still, I’m excited about this technology. I’d love to ditch my wallet.