By Heather McLean

2011 is the year of contactless mobile payments, stated Visa Inc’s Dave Wentker, head of mobile product development, here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Wentker told Mobile Money Exchange that contactless payments are set to take off this year, fuelled mostly by the rise in NFC deployments in smartphones, point of sale and through partnerships within the industry to build the strategic and technological relationships required to make these services work.

“This year we’ve already had Google with Android and rumours of iPhone 5 having NFC embedded. These are huge, huge steps,” remarked Wentker. “We’ve had six years of people asking us ‘When’s a phone for contactless payments coming out?’, and now they finally are.

“But in the meantime, we’ve been building the infrastructure for contactless payments. There was a lot we needed to do, such as adapting processes and security testing; everything that needs to be little bit different on the mobile phone for mobile payments, compared to a piece of plastic,” he added.

Visa is using the mobile phone as a high end technology for contactless payments with NFC and micro SD cards; and a low end technology for feature phones to be used for mobile payments and money transfer.

The company is working globally, with NFC-based mobile payments doing well in North America, and feature phone-based mobile money solutions in a venture with Monitize that Visa is taking part in in India, to create a mobile payments service to enable people to carry out mobile top-ups, pay utility bills and use m-ticketing.

At Mobile World Congress this week, Visa has announced the expansion to its relationship with Russian mobile operator, Beeline, for a virtual pre-pay card. The companies began working together in November 2008 with airtime top-ups.

Wentker remarked: “The point about pre-pay is really important. One of the misconceptions about Visa is that we are only a credit card company, but we work to bring the interoperability of Visa to those with credit accounts, with debit accounts, and those without a bank account, tying together those with good credit and those that aren’t able to use banking, for whatever reason.”

Rachel Bale, mobile manager for mobile innovation at Visa Europe, stated that hybrid markets, where banking is available and there is also use of mobile phones, are also seeing momentum growing for contactless mobile payments.

“I can’t think of any banks that aren’t looking at doing this now,” she commented.