Visa has signed a deal with Samsung that could see the smartphone replacing the humble wallet.
The global alliance is aimed at spreading the adoption of Near Field Communication (NFC) on mobile devices.
Under the agreement, Samsung will pre-load Visa’s contactless payment app, payWave, onto selected next-generation” NFC devices, such as the recently announced Galaxy S4.
“The partnership with Visa represents a step towards a global mobile payment platform,” said Won-Pyo Hong, president of Samsung’s Media Solution Centre. “We believe that we have a strong value proposition for financial institutions that will ultimately allow consumer choice in NFC payments.”
“Samsung devices enabled with Visa payment functionality will no doubt be a powerful product offering – especially in markets where paying with a mobile device is becoming commonplace,” said Jim McCarthy, global head of product at Visa.
The deal also means that banks can use Visa’s Mobile Provisioning Service on Samsung’s smartphones. This allows banks to securely link credit and debit card accounts to a user’s device.
Visa is hoping that the wallet-replacing technology will be huge in the future. It reckons that by 2017, nearly two billion devices will feature NFC technology. While NFC has been around for a while now, it has struggled to get off the ground, despite companies such as Google launching its own flavour of NFC payment technology called Google Wallet.
Apple has famously eschewed NFC in its iPhones and iPad, preferring its own Passbook app included in iOS 6 to most of the work NFC does without an extra chip to drain battery life.
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