Thursday, January 18, 2007

Visa launches mobile platform and dives into merging bank-nfc-mobiles

See Paymentsnews and Textually org to find out that:
Visa in a deal with Nokia has announced the launch of a mobile platform that Visa says "lays the foundation for the commercial availability of mobile payments and services to millions of mobile users around the world.

Well, that is essentially the result of a lot of years of hard work. I remember this announcement in 2000: Nokia and Visa Sign Agreement to Introduce Solutions for Advanced Mobile e-Commerce. At that moment it was all about WAP. And now it is all about NFC.

Regardless of the eventual technical shape, the direction remains clear and the same: mobile technology and banks and hansets and credit-cards all merge and blend to facilitate payments of all sorts and kinds. Yet this time the digital content market is a bit bigger.