Isis signs-on American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa
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Isis, the mobile-payments venture from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, scored a major win Tuesday, signing deals with credit card powerhouses American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa.
The deal will give Isis the ability to link smartphones to credit cards from four of the biggest names in the credit card industry, and it pushes the venture past both Google Wallet and Sprint‘s own wave-and-pay service, which are both set to work (for now) only with MasterCard.
All three competing services offer the same thing -- using a smartphone as a mobile wallet allowing consumers to pay for goods by waving phones over scanners (a technology also known as near-field communication), rather than having to pull a credit card out of a purse or wallet.
Sprint, the third-largest mobile carrier in the U.S., has said it’s working to launch its service before the end of the year. Google Wallet is up and running -- but only about 1 in 100 MasterCard-accepting retailers currently allow mobile payments and only the Nexus S 4G phone (available from Sprint) can be used.
Isis, which was announced last November, is slated to launch in 2012 in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas.
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Isis phone wave-and-pay service launching in Austin, Salt Lake City in 2012
-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles