ICT
Visa, Samsung announce global deal for mobile payments
US credit card giant Visa announced a global alliance with Samsung to
let shoppers make payments by waving their smartphones near a special
reader.
The deal could significantly boost the long-touted use of smartphones
to pay for goods worldwide without any physical contact, and without the
need either for credit cards or cash, it said.
The system could be used by owners of Samsung smart phones equipped
with a technology known as Near Field Communication, or NFC, which lets
a phone transmit information to a nearby reader without touching it.
“A Samsung device equipped with the Visa contactless payment service
is a powerful proposition and will allow us to make mobile payments a
reality for people around the world,” Visa Europe vice president Mariano
Dima said in a statement.
The success of the new system agreed between Visa and Samsung, the
world’s leading smartphone manufacturer, will still depend on whether
banks can be persuaded to use it. Visa said the deal had the potential
to “significantly accelerate” the availability of mobile payments
globally, noting a forecast by ABI Research that 1.95 billion
NFC-enabled devices will ship in 2017.
Visa revealed the agreement on the first day of the Mobile World
Congress in Barcelona, which is trying to raise awareness of the
advantages of NFC, including by letting participants use “NFC badges” on
their mobiles to enter.
Some in the industry are sceptical about NFC’s usefulness, however.
“I think NFC is just a technology in search of a problem to fix that
does not exist because it is really easy to pay in the store,” the
president of eBay subsidiary PayPal, David Marcus, told journalists at
the congress.
The agreement with Samsung is the first of its kind between a leading
manufacturer of NFC-enabled smartphones and a payment network, Visa
said.
AFP
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