Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Visa Taps Samsung for NFC Payment Deal

Visa and Samsung are announcing a deal on Monday that will see future Samsung devices come ready out of the box to connect to the payment network.

visa ready

Samsung is among the initial partners for a broad Visa Ready program introduced last week. Under its deal with Visa, future Near Field Communication (NFC) compatible Samsung phones will come with Visa’s applet and pre-certified to work with its payment system. The devices will also be able to be provisioned for a specific customer over the air, Visa mobile chief Bill Gadja said in an interview last week.

Rather than viewing new payment technologies as a threat, Gadja said the Visa Ready program is a way to turn upstarts into potential allies rather than rivals.

In addition to the Samsung deal, Visa is also announcing a deal with point-of-sale hardware maker Roam.

BlackBerry said in January that its latest devices have also been certified by Visa.

The news comes just as MasterCard has announced a new payments platform called MasterPass, meant to streamline mobile payments options for both retailers and consumers.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik