February 25, 2013

A press release that hit my inbox this morning caught my eye. Visa and Samsung have announced that they are going to partner, and that Visa will preload their Mobile Provisioning Service on all Samsung mobile phones so that they are able to use Visa’s PayWave NFC technology.

The company says that they will load the PayWave applet onto “any phone with NFC functionality” and this will allow them to make “wave and pay” payments on existing contact-less payment systems.

As far as I know, this is the first mobile provider to come to this sort of agreement - I’ve been wondering for a while now how this would pan out, and it looks like Samsung might have exclusive access to it for now. In the press release, they state something particularly interesting:

The Visa payWave mobile applet will be preloaded onto selected next-generation Samsung mobile devices featuring NFC technology and an embedded secure element.

Sounds like the Samsung Galaxy S4, doesn’t it?

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