AT&T, Verizon And T-Mobile Planning NFC Payments For Mobile Phones

Reports are going around hinting that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are planning to test out NFC (Near Field Communication) payment methods in Atlanta and three other cities, and it will be aided by partnerships with Discover Financial Services and British bankers Barclays. Such a move would naturally require new chip readers for merchants, not to mention embedded NFC chips in phones, but if everything works out according to plan, maybe we’ll all be sporting phones that boast an embedded NFC chip in the future. Surprisingly, this move doesn’t seem to include Visa or Mastercard, the two companies you’ve probably think of when making electronic payments at merchant stores, obviously using debit or credit cards. With the backing of such strong companies, it’ll be interesting to see how well the adoption rate of NFC will be. If it makes our lives easier and doesn’t burn a hole in the bank, it does sound rather interesting.