In the world of NFC in the US, Google Wallet was the cumulative efforts between Google and Sprint, while the other 3 major carriers – T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon partnered up with Isis for their own NFC payment systems and it looks like the city of Austin will be one of the first few cities to participate in Isis’s NFC payment services. The service will be launched come 2012 with the merchant hardware coming from Verifone and merchants across the city of Austin will be getting new processing machines but would require “ISIS-enabled mobile phones”. We’re not sure what that means, perhaps only phones on Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T would be able to use the Isis services or would they be separating it by platform?
As it stands now not many phones have NFC built in, apart from Sprint’s Nexus S. Sony Ericsson has recently hopped aboard the NFC bandwagon and there has been no word from Nokia if they plan to add NFC to their Windows Phone 7 devices in the future. Either way it’ll be interesting to see how it all works out, perhaps we could be looking at a Visa/Mastercard scenario where merchants would support both Google Wallet and Isis’s payment services.
