News

Wells Fargo joins smart phone pilot

September 6, 2010

Wells Fargo Bank will participate with Bank of America and U.S. Bank in a pilot that will enable participants to pay for purchases with their smart phones at contactless payment terminals. The trial is being done in association with Visa Inc., the world’s largest payments network.

"Wells Fargo is proud to be participating in Visa’s microSDpayment pilot with DeviceFidelity’s In2Pay technology," Wells Fargo said in a statement. "We are committed to helping our customers succeed financially through innovation. We look forward to sharing our pilot details in the near future." DeviceFidelity’s In2Pay Micro-SD chips can be inserted into smartphones’ memory card slots, turning them into contactless payment devices.

"We want to be commercially ready early in 2011" to let consumers use their cell phones to make purchases in stores, Bill Gadja, Visa’s head of global mobile products, told Reuters, a wire service.

The pilot is scheduled to begin the week of Sept. 13 in New York City, said a spokesperson for Bank of America, which is based in Charlotte, N.C.  The pilot is scheduled to continue through the end of the year. A Visa spokesperson said the card-payments network will be involved in similar pilots in other cities.

There are 140,000 contactless payment terminals in the United States, out of 4 to 5 million payment terminals overall, said Aaron McPherson, research director of payments for Financial Insights.