Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile To Work With Discovery On Mobile Commerce

The three mobile carriers and two financial services giants want to work together to develop the technology and the infrastructure that would allow consumers to pay for purchases with a smartphone wireless signal, Bloomberg on Monday reported.

Such a development, if successful, could possibly start displacing 1 billion credit and debit cards used in the U.S. from such vendors as Visa and MasterCard, Bloomberg reported.

Cell phone-based micropayment systems, in which a customer can use a cell phone as if it were a pre-paid debit card, are already in use in countries such as India, where cell phone use is common but where a credit card infrastructure is not as well developed as in the U.S.

The solution supposedly being proposed by AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, on the other hand, is similar to services already available in Japan, Turkey, and the U.K. Bloomberg said the new service would allow customers to pay for purchases using contactless technology, with the payments processed through Discover's payments network.

Bloomberg said that details about how much retailers would have to invest to build the infrastructure or how much they would have to pay on a per-transaction basis have yet to be unveiled.

The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), an association of over 200 retailers, manufacturers, and service suppliers, in late July held its first-ever Retail Mobil Executive Summit where the topic of mobile payments was addressed.

A panel at the summit predicted that contactless payment systems will eventually become as widespread in the U.S. as it is in other countries.

"With security and privacy concerns in mind, retailers are seeking to take transactions away from their customer's wallets and put them right in their hands, through their mobile devices," the panel concluded, according to the RILA.