CES: Wireless payments at the register with your cell phone are around the corner

After seeing the demonstration that Visa just gave me at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I'm pretty sure it won't be too long before many of us will be paying for everything from our groceries to our Dunkin Donuts wirelessly with our cell phones. Visa had a "pod" in the Near Field Communications (NFC) booth and was showing how a NFC-enabled cell phone such as a new one just recently released by Nokia can be used at just about any credit card terminal that's been enhanced with a $300 peripheral to receive the wireless communication from the phone. 

Provided your Visa card issuer and your wireless carrier decide to support the program, owners of NFC-enabled cell phones will be able to associated their handsets with their existing credit card accounts so that the phone becomes the credit card for that account, rather than the credit card itself. Although NFC-enabled credit cards are available from Visa (ones that you can also wave in front of an NFC-enabled reader), the advantage of using a cell phone is that its a software platform that Visa's credit card infrastructure can deliver other credit card related services to.

For example, with a few keystrokes on the phone, you can see your credit card balance. Or, as the credit card infrastructure sees what you're buying, it can deliver electronic coupons to your phone -- ones that display the bar codes right on the phone's screen where someone working the register in a store can wave it over a bar-code reader. But instead of me trying to describe to you how it works, just check out the video: