The world's largest credit card network is ready to replace plastic with silicon.
Visa hopes to turn hundreds of millions of cellphones into electronic wallets that are simply swiped in front of a merchant's scanner to complete a transaction. This form of "contactless" payment won't require a signature or a personal identification number, but will be limited to purchases of $25 or less, Mr. Gauthier said.
Visa expects about $140-billion (U.S.) worth of the transactions it processes will be done with cellphones by 2010. As large as that amount is, it would represent just a fraction of Visa's $4-trillion worth of transactions each year.
A second form of mobile phone payment that Visa hopes to test is transactions between individuals. How such deals would be authenticated remains to be worked out by the card issuers, but they could be much bigger transactions than the contactless ones, he said.
thro' globeandmail