Visa's Digital Wallet Now Available on Some Smartphones Good news for people suffering from discomfort caused by sitting on a thick wallet full of credit cards and credit card receipts for a long duration: Visa, the credit card company, said it supported making wireless payments through some smartphones, though it would replace the plastic Visa cards issued by banks. Visa last week announced some phones from Samsung, Research In Motion and LG would work with a technology called near field communications, a wireless system that enables payments to be made between mobile devices and merchants" terminals. So rather than yank a credit card out of your wallet, you'd wave your phone over a terminal to make a payment. For Visa-certified near field phones, a security application called PayWave is embedded in a phone's SIM card, chipset or memory card, according to Visa. A merchant with a PayWave-compatible terminal would be able to accept payments from these phones. Visa's certified products include the Samsung Galaxy S II, LG Optimus NET NFC, the BlackBerry Curve and the BlackBerry Bold. Although near field technology is commonplace overseas, it has been slow to enter the mainstream American market. It has been difficult for the all the various interested parties - credit-card companies, banks, technology manufacturers, software makers and carriers - to agree on standards and work together. In September, Google introduced Google Wallet, a near field system for some Android phones, and rumors abound that Apple has been planning similar wireless payment methods for iPhones. Wireless Visa payments will initially work at only 150,000 retail locations in the United States, according to Visa. More than 8 million merchants accept Visa in the United States. But Visa said it was optimistic that near field communications would soon accelerate in the United States as more customers, vendors and technology companies take interest in the wireless payment method. "We're just now seeing all the elements come into place that's going to make it take off," said Bill Gajda, Visa's global head of mobile product.He said near field communications was spreading quickly in Canada, Singapore and in Hong Kong, which should help pique interest among banks and vendors in the American market. But what's wrong with traditional plastic for payments in the first place? Nothing, says Mr. Gajda, but near field-equipped smartphones can do things that credit cards can't, like account for electronic coupons or include social-networking tools that let you automatically share what you buy with friends. And what's in it for Visa? The credit-card company likes near field-equipped smartphones because it can gain more details about customers and their spending patterns, further enabling it to share this information with third-party marketing companies, said Mr. Gajda. "That's a new business for Visa," Mr. Gajda said. We're working with GAP and a number of other retailers to make their marketing programs and loyalty programs more targeted, more relevant and more real-time by marrying the data they have and the data we have. He noted, however, that credit card companies could already gain access to this type of information if a credit card was added to a third-party app on a phone.