Visa and Samsung Partner to Deliver NFC Capability to Banks’ Mobile Offerings

Visa and Samsung announced a new partnership that will allow financial institutions to use Visa’s Mobile Provisioning Service to download account information to NFC-enabled Samsung phones. Samsung will also include Visa’s payWave mobile payments app as a preloaded app on its NFC phones, a statement released today said.

The new global partnership between the companies will be particularly effective in regions where mobile payments already have widespread adoption, Jim McCarthy, Visa’s global head of product, said in today’s statement. Adding NFC capability will provide a secure way for financial institutions to store account information on the millions of NFC smartphones that Samsung has sold, he added.

[See Related: MasterCard, mFoundry team up on Mobile Payments]

Thanks to the new partnership, banks will be able to launch NFC payments programs on a large scale, the statement said. Visa’s Mobile Provisioning Service will be linked with Samsung’s Key Management System to create secure storage domains for issuers that will allow them to load account information over the air to a secure chip in SamSung devices.

Visa said that a study from ABI Research, a market intelligence provider, predicted that 1.95 billion NFC-enabled mobile devices would be shipped in 2017, explaining why the company would want to invest in the technology now. The Visa payWave app and Mobile Provisioning Service will be demoed at the Mobile World Congress, a major mobile convention going on in Barcelona this week, according to the statement.

Jonathan Camhi has been an associate editor with Bank Systems & Technology since 2012. He previously worked as a freelance journalist in New York City covering politics, health and immigration, and has a master's degree from the City University of New York's Graduate School ... View Full Bio