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Visa teams with Vodafone, Intel; intros new mobile commerce services

Visa partners with Intel and Vodafone to further secure its potential worldwide dominance of mobile commerce.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

Visa kicked off Mobile World Congress 2012 this week in a big way with several announcements surrounding new mobile commerce projects.

See also: CNET's Mobile World Congress 2012 coverage

For starters, Visa has set up separate partnerships with Intel and Vodafone.

With Intel, the two enterprises have entered into a multi-device, multi-year agreement to develop mobile commerce solutions for Intel Atom-based smartphones and tablets.

Additionally, Intel's Smartphone Reference Device solution will be certified for use with Visa payWave and integrated with near-field communications (NFC) technology.

Intel has already demonstrated its new-found commitment to the advancement of smartphone technology back at CES 2012 in January.

As for Vodafone, this partnership (touted as "the largest of its kind between a global payment network and mobile operator") will involve the co-development of a Vodafone-branded proposition that will be offered to consumers across Vodafone's customer base across more than 30 countries. Based on its prepaid account services, Visa will support the payment network and functionality.

This service will initially be launched in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, and the UK, starting in the coming financial year.

Finally, Visa also announced a new solution of its own, targeted towards financial institutions and mobile network operators.

Dubbed as a "one-stop solution," this global service transforms smartphones into Visa payment devices by wirelessly linking Visa accounts with NFC-enabled devices.

This digital wallet solution gets even bigger as it will include support for Visa and non-Visa payments, as well as loyalty programs and mass transit applications on smartphones.

Intel is involved actually involved here too as on its new Intel Atom-based smartphones and tablets, the chip maker has agreed to use Visa's global provisioning service to enable mobile subscribers to securely download payment account information to NFC-enabled devices.

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