Neither mobile banking apps nor mobile payment technologies are anything new, but the depth of Visa's newfound commitment to anything and everything mobile here is pretty unique. The company has announced a slew of initiatives to make it as frighteningly easy as possible for cardholders to do cool things with their accounts right from their phones starting with the launch of the Nokia 6212 Classic next month, which will serve up NFC-based contactless payments, cardholder-to-cardholder transfers, and realtime account alerts (subject to issuing bank availability). Meanwhile, they've wasted no time jumping on the Android bandwagon, revealing that they've hooked up with Chase to offer an Android app that delivers notifications, merchant "offers," and a location-based search of nearby retailers that accept Visa cards (which is pretty much all of them in our experience). If the Chase trial pans out, Visa plans to shop the Android app around to other issuing banks. Finally, there's also a new web-based mobile money transfer pilot going down that's scheduled to kick off around the end of the year involving several banks and "as many as" 6,000 cardholders; what are the odds that those 6,000 are going to be transferring much money among each other, though?

[Via CNET]

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Oh, Canada! If all goes to plan, you Canucks up north will soon be able to take advantage of technology that is already in use in many corners of the globe. Reportedly, the Royal Bank of Canada and Visa Canada will be teaming up to launch a pilot program that enables users to purchase goods by just waving their cellphone in front of a reader. The handsets will sport an embedded microchip to pass along payment information, and similar to PayPass setups, it'll require no pin / password / signature for transactions under $25. Anne Koski, head of payment innovations at Royal Bank's cards division, noted that it was still too early to say which mobiles would eventually feature the built-in technology, but hopefully we'll be finding out sooner rather than (even) later.

[Image courtesy of USATech]

It's not as foreign of a concept now that PayPal is offering mobile payments in the good ol' US of A and RFID credit cards abound, but Visa and Nokia are getting their own little project off the ground in Malaysia for credit card payments from a mobile phone. The "Mobile Visa Wave Payment Pilot" is based on the simple idea of smart card payments, but embeds the radio inside a Nokia phone instead of a credit card. During the trial, 200 Visa Wave cardholders will get to spend their monies with the wave of a special Nokia 3230 phone, with 2500 retail outlets accepting such payments. Visa of course claims a great deal of security for the project, but we're still leaving that blink card at home for now.