Most of us already have a hard time living without our cell phones and now its going to be even more difficult. The word on the street is that AT&T, Verizon, and TMobile have plans to team up to give the credit card companies some competition by allowing customers to use their smartphones as a form of payment instead of swiping a credit card. Smartphone users would be able to simply wave their phone in front of a wireless reader and their payment is complete. It sounds a little far out there, but apparently there has been talk in the works for several years.
According to sources cited by Bloomberg, these top wireless companies have plans to test this new service out in stores in Atlanta and in three other cities that have not been released yet. The details are a little fuzzy, but we know the technology will likely include a radio frequency identification tag that would somehow be embedded into the smartphone and linked to the users account. Smartphones can already do just about everything and soon they might even be able to pay for your groceries. This type of technology has been used in other countries like Japan, Turkey, and the U.K.
Bloomberg also reports that credit card companies like MasterCard and Visa have been investing in such mobile technology options for years now. They have launched similar systems that used the same RFID technology but it hasn’t quite caught on yet. It is reported that Visa has developed an iPhone App with DeviceFidelity which gives people the option to store payment information for multiple credit card accounts. Similiarly, MasterCard is still hyping up its PayPass service and has even developed a PayPass stickers that goes on the back of mobile phones. It will be interesting to see if the top wireless providers make this happen and further set smartphone users apart from the rest.
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