Visa, the well-known credit card company has come forth with a plan to globally mesh cellphone users with their customer base. Nokia is heavily involved with this idea and has partnered with Visa on it.
How would they do this? They take a gadget like a cellphone and make it possible for their customers to pay by using this instead of the slender card. Nobody goes anywhere these days without some form of communication. In most cases your cellphone is full of contacts, information and priceless conveniences.
Visa hopes that you will soon be able to swipe your cellphone over a special reader that electronically communicates with a microchip over your phone. Then, the phone owner has an opportunity to confirm the purchase amount using a buttom press…and you’re done!
Consumers can then have the capability to manage their accounts from the mobile phone and they hope to also have the ability to enable contact-free payments, remote payments, person to person payments and mobile coupons.
NFC technology was developed by former Philips chip unit NSP and Sony. This technology is already widely used in public transport (bus passes and subway passes) access cards. Visa claims its cards and payment systems generate over $4 trillion in sales volume and they are known to be the largest credit card payment system. Visa went public with their new operations named Visa, Inc, for those of you that watch the market.
The first version of the technology was released recently and includes contactless mobile payment, personalization over mobile telephony networks, coupons and direct marketing. Other versions are expected to show face later in the year and plans are to include remote payment options and person to person payment capability.
Other companies are getting involved. Over in Japan, JCB, their leading credit card company, started Europe’s first mobile phone credit payment trial with Nokia and Dutch telecom operator KPN back in October. It was a small trial with hopes that it will become a practice they can release to the public successfully. Germany and Finland have also tested some areas of this technology.
This really opens a new world up for those that travel often or do business but how will it affect personal users? Will it be convenient or another identity theft risk.
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