Visa today announced a new mobile payment partnership with Samsung.
Under the agreement, financial institutions will be able to securely upload customers’ payment account information onto NFC-enabled Samsung phones using Visa’s Mobile Provisioning Service. Also, Samsung has agreed to pre-load Visa’s payWave app onto its NFC-enabled devices, allowing end-users to make touchless payments.
Brad Greene, senior business leader at Visa, hopes the service will allow millions of Visa card holders to pay at the point of sale with Samsung mobile phones.
“It’s really intended to be a broader partnership where we’ll be deeply engaging in mobile commerce activities on a number of fronts,” said Greene.
In addition to its new work with Samsung, Visa has also announced a new partnership with ROAM, a mobile payment acceptance technology provider. ROAM will be the first company to participate in Visa’s new Visa Ready program, which is designed to accelerate the global growth of different payment options by using mobile technology.
“What Visa is doing is creating a program where we’ve created standards, guidelines, best practices and rules that we think really will help this new form of payment scale and help the solutions providers develop their solutions in such a way that they’re Visa-approved and secure,” said Greene.
The partnership between Visa and Samsung seems to be coming along at an opportune time, with a recent Forrester report suggesting mobile payments in the U.S. could reach as high as $90 billion by 2017.
