Momentum in the mobile payment sector continues to grow with news that the largest US consumer bank, the Bank of America, is to team with Visa on a test program next month aimed at creating a ‘digital wallet.’ Reuters reports that the duo will trial the service in New York until the end of the year, aiming to let customers use smartphones to pay for purchases in stores. Bank of America, which introduced mobile banking in 2007, has more than 5 million customers conducting US$15 billion in transactions via their phones — primarily bill payments and account transfers. Reuters notes that these numbers are small compared with the bank’s 29 million online banking customers, who conduct 1.5 billion transactions electronically. Visa, the world’s largest payment processor, also plans to conduct a similar test program with US Bancorp this year, from October.

Meanwhile, competition is increasing from outside the banking world. Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Discover Financial Services are working on forming a joint venture aimed at offering mobile payments services, whilst KDDI and SoftBank Mobile have announced plans to deploy an interoperable NFC-based system for Japan and South Korea. This week alone Apple was reported to be recruiting an experienced NFC executive to head its m-commerce unit, and China Unicom announced a big investment in NFC technology.