Two biggest names in their fields come together
Visa and Samsung have joined forces in a bid to accelerate user adoption of mobile money along with the take-up of NFC ‘tap-and-pay’ technology. The Visa Samsung global alliance signals the first of its kind between a leading NFC handset manufacturer and payment organisation. Under the deal, Samsung will preload Visa’s pay Wave app on to its NFC smartphones, making it easier for consumers and financial institutions to link their new handsets to their bank accounts.
Visa, the world’s largest credit and debit card provider, says contactless payments have quadrupled over the last year and are now generating around 13 million transactions a month.
Meanwhile, while ABI Research forecasts that a total of 1.95 billion NFC-enabled devices will ship in 2017, a large proportion of them made by Korean giant Samsung.
The Visa-Samsung agreement follows in the footsteps of a similar initiative earlier this week by MasterCard which launched MasterPass, an enhanced version of its mobile wallet PayPass.
