Visa today announced a variety of mobile banking tests for U.S. customers. The tests focus on mobile payments and money transfer, which are already available in many other countries, particularly in Eastern Asia.

The most significant test involves contactless payments using the Nokia 6212 Classic phone, expected to ship next month. The phone includes a near-field communications chip, which Visa’s software will use to communicate with its bank partners.

In addition to actually paying for retail purchases, customers could use the phone to transfer funds and receive notifications of special offers and account activity, officials said.

Visa also announced a money transfer experiment with U.S. Bank. That test is scheduled to begin by the end of this year. Customers will access their accounts through mobile Web browsers. A second phase will expand the system to overseas accounts in the first half of next year.

For now, the multitude of tests will continue, as has been the case for several years. Visa cited Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and the United Kingdom as locations where it already performs tests similar to those announced today.

Visa did announce plans for a “broadly available” mobile payment services, however, initially it’s only for customers of Google Android phones who also happen to be Chase bank customers. Users will be able to receive notifications about transaction activity, obtain offers from merchants, find those merchants on a map and find bank machines.

Visa said it plans to extend the service to other banks, and presumably to other mobile phone operating systems, in the future.