Google Prepping Mobile Payment System For Android

Google is partnering with credit processing heavyweights such as MasterCard and Citigoup, Inc to create a mobile payment system for Android powered devices according to the Wall Street Journal.

The new payment system would use NFC for transactions and surprisingly, Google won’t take a cut of the money being sent. Instead the search engine giant will be tapping customer information, data that has been largely neglected by most mobile payment processors. What Google intends to do with customer and mobile payment data remains unknown but it could be integrated into its shopping services to give buyers a more accurate reading of how popular a product is based on number of purchases.

Google is partnering with payment processing heavyweights and a who’s who in the mobile payment landscape such as Citigroup, Verifone, Mastercard and Vivotech. The new payment system would be baked in to the Android OS and mobile payment functionality would initially be available to Citigroup users. Verifone and Vivotech would provide retailers with NFC readers to accept payments from Android phones.

The Nexus S sold by Samsung has NFC built in which is used to send information between compatible devices and in the future mobile payments when Google rolls out its Android based payment system.

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Google hasn’t given an exact time frame of when its NFC based payment system will be rolled out but reports say New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington D.C will be test cities and a system should be rolled out in the next four months.