We’ve been waiting forever and a half for NFC technology to take over our lives and rid ourselves of silly wallets and credit cards. Visa is creating a digital wallet service that’ll make all that real later this year.
Visa’s idea is to let you store your Visa accounts, non-Visa accounts and even online payment services like PayPal into one digital wallet. This way, you can pay for goods online with this do-everything wallet, with one account rather than various cards and different accounts. You can customise which cards you want to use but it’s simplifying how you pay.
And that sounds fine and all but what’s more interesting to us is that the digital wallet is going to use NFC technology to let customers make offline, real life purchases with their phones too. They’ll be using Visa’s payWave app and NFC-capable phones to make it happen. I’m so ready for this. [GigaOM]
Mitch
Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 12:32 PMfinally can’t wait for this to be implemented I have a nexus s and I haven’t even tried out the nfc capabilities yet so very keen for this to be released. However I haven’t got a visa I have a mastercard hope mastercard follows suit and does a similar thing otherwise I will have to look at swapping
Nodeity
Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 2:17 PMIt’s probably a sign of my age, but I really worry that we are getting too comfortable with giving large corporations access to our financials. I’ve seen that add where you flash your credit card across a receiver and go without getting a receipt, I believe it’s called Near Field Communications or NFC. I personally get some satisfaction in looking at the receipt and seeing that the transaction was at least accurate, and you have a record of it! Plus, what happens when you lose your phone! I personally have never lost my wallet (knock on wood) but I’ve misplaced my phone on occasion…
Paul Taylor
Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 2:43 PMThere’s one problem with this: what if your phone battery goes flat? You can’t pay for anything, and you can’t even call anyone to say you’re stranded somewhere with no money to pay for it.
I’ll stick with my wallet for now, cheers.
The Gremlin
Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 3:43 PMNFC requires no power. Like acccess card most people use to get into their offices at work.
The Gremlin
Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 3:42 PMI have an iPhone, but hoping I can jump into the bandwagon with a NFC SIM, which I hear are also coming.
Chris
Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 5:45 PMdangers with NFC payment – anyone can walk past your pocket witha reciever and then :O you’ve had your money stolen
Tim
Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 9:13 PMhow is this going to work between paypal and all the online stores who refuse to use it?