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Debenhams is in talks to introduce till payments through mobile phones as research finds that handsets are set to become ubiquitous as a way of paying for goods in five years’ time.

The high street retailer said it is exploring ways to let customers use their mobiles to pay for goods in-store.

Harriet Williams, Debenhams’ head of digital, said, ”It is something we are looking at and talking to partners about. When we’ve done research, we’ve seen that it’s something particularly younger customers are more interested in.”

Orange and Barclaycard have launched the UK's first contactless payment service allowing customers to pay for purchases using a smartphone.

Orange Quick Tap allows payments of up to £15 in over 50,000 outlets around the country, including Pret A Manger, McDonald's and Subway.

Customers have to purchase a Samsung Tocco Lite smartphone to use the service, which is available for £55 on pay-as-you-go or free on a £10 per month, two-year contract.

Near-field communications (NFC) technology will be built into one in five smartphones by 2014 as mobile payment and interactive promotions take off, according to a report from Juniper Research.

Over 23 million NFC-capable smartphones are expected to be in circulation by the end of 2011, said the NFC Retail Marketing & Mobile Payments report.

This willl rise to around 300 million by 2014, and half of these devices are expected to be active in the US.

HANOVER: O2 is to introduce new services in the UK in the coming months, including a wallet application and direct-to-bill and peer-to-peer payment facilities, as the company looks to take advantage of mainstream smartphone use.

The services are already available in countries such as Germany and Kenya, and will be made available to UK customers soon, according to Matthew Key, chief executive of O2 parent company Telefónica, during his keynote at CeBIT.

"Near-field communication will allow people to carry their credit card in their phone and scan transactions. This is fantastic for customers and retailers because it takes a lot of the supply chain costs out," he said.

EBay and its online payment unit, PayPal, on Thursday sued Google and two executives for stealing trade secrets related to mobile payment systems. The two executives, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, were formerly with PayPal and led the launch on Thursday of Google's own mobile payment system in partnership with MasterCard, Citigroup and phone company Sprint. The suit highlights the growing battle by a wide range of companies from traditional finance to Silicon Valley trying to take a major stake in what has been described as a US$1 trillion ($1.2 trillion) opportunity in mobile payments. The mobile phone is seen as the digital personal wallet of the future. The eBay suit said Bedier worked for nine years at PayPal, most recently serving as vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures. He joined Google on January 24 this year.

InMobi SmartPay™ will enable app developers, game companies, and content providers in the US $200bn mobile content and virtual goods space to expand their business and monetize their users quickly and easily into new markets by providing a one-time, no-cost, single point of integration across multiple countries.

The solution offers consumers a seamless, pure mobile checkout experience using secure, direct to carrier billing to start, but expanding to all forms of mobile payment methods including credit cards, PayPal, and local mobile wallets by the end of 2011.

†The new solution already offers reach to over one billion consumers in seven countries, including the US, UK, Germany, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Malaysia, with huge growth plans to expand to over three billion consumers in 30 countries by the end of the year.

Big news today in the world of mobile payments: the three largest operators in the UK have announced a joint venture to offer mobile wallet services to its customers, in the hopes of finally kick-starting a service that has been long on discussion but painfully short on execution up to now. O2 UK, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) UK and Everything Everywhere (itself a joint venture between France Telecom’s Orange UK and T-Mobile UK ) are banding together to form what they call a cross-platform, single solution. The operators say that this will create a simplified, one-stop shop for banks, merchants, advertisers and other marketing partners in the mobile payments value chain.

And perhaps most importantly: with companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Visa and to a lesser extent Square looking to spearhead mobile payments with themselves in the center of the transaction, it’s clear that that mobile operators have decided that scale, and control of those all-important SIM cards, is their best weapon.

“We’ll be customers of the venture, anyone can be,” explained Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2. “[O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere] have actually built and developed capabilities and we’re putting this together [and] creating a market for those who don’t have the scale to do it. The JV makes it easier to access this.”

American Express' new digital payments and commerce platform Serve has just announced its first carrier deal since its launch in March of this year. The company's new partnership with U.S. operator Sprint will allow Serve's mobile wallet application to be made available in the Sprint Zone for customers using select Android phones.

Serve, which can be funded by a bank account, debit or credit card, or from another Serve account, does not require users to be American Express card holders. Instead, it's aimed at those who don't rely on credit cards. With Serve, customers can shop both online and offline, anywhere American Express is accepted.

In the future, Serve will also be used for redeeming offers on goods and services, too, by way of a Groupon-like program.

Four major credit card companies are working with the Isis mobile wallet venture to install mobile payment security applications on upcoming NFC-ready smartphones in the U.S.

Visa expects to license its own software, called PayWave, to the upcoming near-field communication (NFC) smartphones sold by the three wireless carriers in the Isis consortium, a Visa spokeswoman said yesterday.

All four of the credit networks offer contactless payment software, which today is more widely used on cards containing chips than in smartphones. Isis officials said in July that having all four on board will increase consumer and merchant acceptance of NFC-ready smartphones used to make point-of-sale purchases.

Summary: Mobile payments are expected to pick up rapidly in the next year, but don’t expect NFC technology to be at the forefront just yet.

Mobile payments is a hot topic at the moment, but there’s actually quite little going on in comparison when it comes to actual activity. There are hardly any smartphones enabled with NFC technology, nor are most of the digital wallet programs set up and running extensively yet.

this field is expected to rapidly change within in the next year, according to a group of panelists assembled at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 conference in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. The mobile payments spectrum could (and should) look vastly different at this time in 2012.

LONDON – Isis, a joint venture between U.S. mobile phone service providers AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, has announced that HTC, LG, Motorola Mobility, RIM, Samsung Mobile and Sony Ericsson will introduce NFC-enabled mobile devices that implement Isis NFC and technology standards for electronic payment.

Isis is working with DeviceFidelity Inc. (Richardson, Texas) to standardize the addition of NFC functionality to cell phones to turn them into electronic wallets, which DeviceFidelity does using a micro-SD card technology.

Pilot deployments are expected in 2012.

New mobile payment services help banks realise the future of payments

Visa Europe, Europe’s leading payments technology company, today announced the launch of Visa Mobile Person-to-Person payments and Visa Alerts: two new services designed to help consumers manage their money and make payments using their mobile phones.

the new services give Visa Europe’s member banks the tools to respond to growing consumer demand for fast, secure, convenient and innovative ways to make and manage payments using their mobile phones.

Auction giant eBay and Facebook are quietly forging stronger ties with a secret joint partnership and the addition of Facebook exec Katie Mitic to eBay’s board of directors.

Mitic, the current director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook, will now become the twelfth member of eBay’s board of directors. S

Mitic is a whiz when it comes to mobile. She helped launch the Palm Pre and the company’s app store before it was snatched up by HP. Her background in building and promoting developer platforms, especially in the mobile arena, should prove useful as eBay strives to replace the wallet with the phone by 2015.

QR code technology arrived late to North America for numerous reasons, and with Near Field Communication (NFC) fast emerging, it is a valid concern that it may not tip the adoption needle in time to establish itself as a household communication tool.

With the release of the Google Wallet, Google has been building a lot of support for NFC. This may explain why they replaced QR codes with NFC for Google Places. Another reason may be because the stickers they distributed to the retailers were intended to be permanent, in which case NFC makes more sense. They may be a bit ahead of the market on this, but if they are distributing millions of these stickers across North America, it pays to plan ahead. Following their announcement, a vast number of articles surfaced with some variation of “QR codes are dead”. This in my opinion was a bit excessive considering Google Places is the only implementation where they made the changeover.

Getting away from Google, let’s briefly look at the expected rate of NFC adoption. Smartphones have been available on this continent for at least 4 years and they currently hold approximately 33% of the market. Google’s Nexus S is one of the first phones to be available with NFC technology and it was released only this spring. Blackberry will start releasing models this fall, and Apple has yet to confirm whether they will include NFC support in the iPhone 5. It’s not unreasonable to expect NFC gaining mass adoption no sooner than 2-3 years.

What kind of services is Schmidt referring to when he says that Google is looking at Google+ as an identity platform that could support other services? Dave Winer thinks that the company wants to effectively become a bank — something he also suspects that Apple and Amazon are interested in as well — and that’s definitely a possibility. Apple and Google both seem interested in NFC technology (near-field communication), which turns mobile devices into electronic wallets, and having a social network tied to an individual user’s identity would come in handy. Ross Dawson says Google wants to build a “reputation engine” using Google+ as a platform.

Program doesn't require coupons or NFC chips; discounts appear on Amex statements after a purchase

Computerworld - American Express Thursday announced the national rollout of mobile payment system that pairs its Amex credit card with a user's smartphone-based Foursquare profile to offer discounts for retail purchases. The discounts, initially available from retailers H&M and Sports Authority, are credited to a user's Amex card within three to five days of a purchase, the company said, adding that no coupons, smartphone codes or NFC smartphone chips are needed. Foursquare, a mobile platform that uses GPS technology, currently has more than 10 million subscribers who use the service as a social network to share their location with friends. The joint effort requires that cardholders register with Amex to link their card to their Foursquare profile.

The majority of Canadians would be happy with a cash-free future using digital forms of payment instead of carrying currency, according to a new PayPal Canada survey.

Leger Marketing polled 1,512 Canadian adults online and found 56% would prefer using a digital wallet.

Thirty-four per cent would rather carry a smartphone than a pocket full of change to make a payment and 36% would use their phone to pay for something as inexpensive as a $5.50 latte or as big ticket as a $272.30 iPod.

Zoosh is a new technology that brings NFC-like payments to any phone with a speaker — i.e. every smartphone on the market.

Using the almost-inaudible 20,000KHz range — which almost every cell phone speaker is capable of — Zoosh technology can then send data to a receiving microphone. The end point can either be a point of sale — a shop, a ticket machine — or it can be another mobile phone. Apparently the technology has been successfully used in noisy environments — and it’s also fairly safe to assume that a technology like Zoosh would be designed to incorporate as much redundancy and error checking as possible.

Narrate, the company behind Zoosh, envisions two main use cases for its ultrasonic payment system. The first is just like Google Wallet: for $30 — a third of the price of NFC hardware — Narrate says that points of sale can be upgraded to accept Zoosh payments.