Three of America’s four largest telcos are said to be teaming up to test a new mobile-payment service.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile plan to give it a go in a handful of markets. The carriers will reportedly work with Barclays PLC and Discover Financial Services. Customers would be able to pay for services at participating businesses via their smartphones.
It could be the beginning of a trend that has had much better success catching on in Europe than it has in the United States. While consumers have been concerned about security issues, U.S. carriers would likely have a major battle taking on credit behemoths like Visa and Mastercard, which have their own mobile-payment ideas.
We shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves. One telecom exec that the Journal spoke to said talks among the telcos were in an early stage, and an analyst said popularity of such a service would be unlikely in the short term.
One stumbling block is that handset makers haven’t been in a hurry to install what’s called “near-field communication" chips into their devices due to the fact that mobile payments haven’t exactly taken off. NFC chips are what cash registers use to read credit information.
