Samsung and Visa Make Deal for Implementing Mobile Payment in Next-Gen NFC Devices
Roshan Ashraf Shaikh / 12 years ago
Efforts are made to make mobile payments easier and more practical in every step, like how Paypal introduced a mobile device to accept credit cards. Samsung went ahead and made a deal with Visa to do just that. The deal will allow Samsung to embed Visa’s own payWave mobile payment applet in the next generation smartphones and tablets with NFC (Near Field Communication). The alliance was formally announced on Monday at Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona.
The next generation Samsung Galaxy S IV is all set to be announced in March and is rumoured to have Visa payWave implementation. This is a news that many officials from Visa and Samsung have confirmed. Since the use of NFC has taken its time to grow, this alliance should help to speed things up.
However, Brad Greene, Visa’s head of NFC payment said that there has been some friction with the implementation of NFC in the United States. The reason why they signed up with Samsung was because the Korean company produces practically half of all the Android powered smartphones in the market today. Since their goal was to make mobile payments available through many devices, Samsung is special and it’s because of this that they get an advantage.
In the agreement, Samsung agreed to load the payWave applet in its devices with NFC embedded in a chip with an encryption algorithm called secure element. The payWave applet also can be used in SIMs, where it can be moved from phone to phone. Samsung will manage the encryption keys and provide security capability to banks and mobile carriers for allowing their users to activate the services.
This alliance will also allow banks and carriers to implement faster, easier and cheaper mobile payment options using NFC according to Greene. Currently Visa payWave is used in a consortium of AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and even Google Wallet.
However, Visa isn’t the only one eyeing up NFC functionality. MasterCard have also announced that it is expanding beyond NFC so that merchants can let customers use QR codes, credit cards and anything else for transactions.
Source: The Verge | Computer World
