Google plans to start testing a mobile-payment service at stores in New York and San Francisco, reports Bloomberg. Within four months, Google’s Near Field Communications technology will letting shoppers use their phones to ring up purchases, people familiar with the project said.
The company will reportedly pay to install thousands of special cash- register systems from VeriFone Systems at merchant locations. ViVOtech, a provider of mobile-payment technology, will also play a role in the tests, which will include Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Google’s mobile-payment service would face competition from EBay’s PayPal and ISIS, a joint effort of several mobile companies. The ISIS system, backed by AT&T and Verizon Wireless, will rely on Discover Financial Services to handle the payments. ISIS plans to test its mobile service this year.
Near-field-communication technology lets consumers pay for products and services by tapping a device against a register at checkout, giving them an alternative to cash or physical credit cards. The Google service may combine a consumer’s financial account information, gift-card balances, store loyalty cards and coupon subscriptions on a single NFC chip on a phone.
Visa today announced its own service that will allows U.S. consumers to receive and send funds to any eligible Visa credit, debit or prepaid account.
Visa will let people use plastic to pay one another by sending payments directly to their Visa card. Users also will be able to send money using a recipient’s mobile phone number or e-mail address. In those cases, recipients will receive a message that someone is sending them money and then enter their own Visa account number to receive it.
Bank customers of participating financial institutions will have the option to select a Visa account as the destination for funds when making a personal payment.
Users enter the recipient’s 16-digit Visa account, email address or mobile phone number, allowing consumers to send funds directly from their bank account to a recipient’s Visa account, similar to the act of sending money on PayPal. Visa is actually working with outside company CashEdge to offer Popmoney, which allows bank customers to “Pay Other People” (POP), using only a recipient’s email address, cell phone number or bank account information.
Currently, Samsung’s Nexus S phone is one of the few that allows for NFC transactions.
Google has not been able to nail a payment processing system, observes TechCrunch. They have Google Checkout, but customers clearly prefer competitors like PayPal, which has about 90 million active credit card accounts.
eBay’s iPhone app has been downloaded 12 million times, and smartphone sales by eBay sellers will top $1.5 billion in 2010. Apple has over 100 million accounts set up with built-in credit card access. The main goal for Apple may be to get a piece of the $6.2 trillion Americans spend each year with credit cards.
