Verizon Wireless, AT&T may lead a venture to replace credit cards

I do agree that a mobile payment is the next logical step for the consumers. The never expected carrier partnership on mobile payments is revolutionary and game changing. The right business model is what lacking all these days to work with financial network like Visa and Master card. The details are not known at this point about the banks participating in this initiative. The carriers most like to use the existing transaction clearing networks like Discover, rather than building their own. Convincing the retailer to spend sub $200 on new terminal would be another challenge. It all depends on mass adaptation. It took more than a decade to Visa and Master card to convince the retailers and consumer. But the moment may be right because the retailer are currently disappointed with transaction fee set by Visa and Master card which they have been fighting for years. Visa is very active in the space, they recently announced a partnership with Texas based start-up called Device Fidelity, to NFC enable the existing iPhone though a case. Overall, this is very positive step, which may provoke the other operators across the world to build their own payment networks or at least to get into co-operative agreements with Visa Master card.

AT&T offers businesses a smartphone credit-card payment service

Mobile payments reached $68 billion globally in 2009 and should exceed $600 billion by 2014, according to Generator Research. Mobile payments made using credit cards over Smartphone’s account for just a small percentage of that total market. The browser based AprivaPay is very convenient solution for SMB's with few field workers. Another start-up from twitter co-founder named Square has similar offering targeting SMB's with cheaper and simpler services but it currently works with iPhone only. Lets hope AT&T's marketing muscle helps Apriva go forward.