Visa said that it will be ramping up its contactless mobile payment plans, so it looks like NFC payments will actually be a big force in the United States.
We’ve been talking about mobile payments for a long time here but nothing has really happened to make paying for a train ride as easy as it is in places like Japan. Now that all the major credit card companies are on board, we may finally see some traction. Visa said it will expand its chip mirgration in the United States, work with vendors to adopt this, expand the processing infrastructure with an emphasis on security and establish a counterfeit fraud liability shift.
“By encouraging investments in EMV contact and contactless chip technology, we will speed up the adoption of mobile payments as well as improve international interoperability and security,” said Jim McCarthy, global head of product, Visa Inc, in a prepared statement. “As NFC mobile payments and other chip-based emerging technologies are poised to take off in the coming years, we are taking steps today to create a commercial framework that will support growth opportunities and create value for all participants in the payment chain.”
We still face the issue of mobile payment fragmentation, as it’s not clear how Google Wallet will interoperate with Isis or Serve but the ball is definitely rolling. As I’ve mentioned before, mobile payments won’t really get going until Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover are fully on board and all of these payment companies are finally committed to contactless payments in the United States.
[Via Visa]