Visa certifies more smartphones for NFC payments
Visa has added smartphones from Samsung Electronics, Research In Motion and LG Electronics to the list of devices it has certified to work with the 185,000 NFC-based payWave payment terminals in Europe.
All the certified products run Visa's payWave application on a secure SIM card and use NFC (Near Field Communications), a short range communications standard, to securely transmit payment information to a contactless payment terminal, according to Visa.
The first round of certified phones are: Samsung Galaxy S II, LG Optimus NET NFC, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Bold 9790, BlackBerry Curve 9360 and BlackBerry Curve 9380. Read more...
High-skill visa reform needs action by Congress, Obama says
President Obama's administration has been tweaking U.S. immigration policy and making little changes where it can to try to encourage the type of immigrant it wants.
But Obama on Tuesday said that real changes to high-skill immigration policy will require action from Congress.
"On the high-skill immigration area, that's not something that we can necessarily do on our own," Obama said at a meeting of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
"We can expedite some of the visas that are already in place and try to streamline that process to make it move faster," the president said, but "we may need some legislative help on that area." Read more...
Visa’s mobile payment plan ‘most comprehensive to date’
Visa's plan to launch a digital wallet system in the U.S. and Canada this fall is by far the largest and most ambitious of any similar initiative announced by credit card processors, banks or wireless carriers.
Still, Visa faces challenges when it comes to merchant acceptance of near field communication (NFC) terminals that work with smartphones and when it comes to merchants' willingness to pay transaction fees to Visa's partner banks, analysts said.
Part of what makes the announced plan so impressive, analysts said, is that Visa is already enormous: There are 1.8 billion Visa cards in use globally. More than half of U.S. credit card transactions each year are handled by Visa. MasterCard, American Express and Discover are the next largest credit card companies. Read more...
Isis says carrier-backed mobile payments ‘accelerated,’ not ‘dialing back’
The mobile commerce joint venture Isis has been working for months to engage Visa, MasterCard and other major U.S. banks in smartphone payments with near-field communication (NFC) technology, an Isis marketing executive clarified late Wednesday.
The Wall Street Journal reported early Wednesday that Isis had dropped its plans for its own system, in which carriers collect payments made by smartphone in exchange for a system open to Visa and others. The Isis joint venture includes AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA.
However, Isis Marketing chief Jaymee Johnson told that Isis had formally announced in a press release on April 4 that it was opening its infrastructure to "all merchants, banks, payment networks and carriers." Read more...