Beginning this week, New Yorkers won’t have to pull out cash or credit to pay for their bus, subway, train or taxi fares. Instead, they’ll be able to pay using their iPhones as part of a pilot program for Visa’s payWave program, which allows users to make contactless payments.
The system makes it as easy as waving your payWave-enabled phone in front of a sensor, which then securely completes the transaction.
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The solution is different than many of the mobile payment solutions we’ve discussed, in that it doesn’t use Near Field Communication to communicate with the vendor. Instead, the system works on “a majority of smart phones that have a slot for a memory card”. As we wrote when we first discovered the payWave program “users can insert the card into their phone’s memory slot to transform their phones into mobile payment devices.”
With this pilot program, those with payWave-enabled phones will be able to pay for New York City subway, PATH rail system and NJ Transit fares using their phones, along with fares for more than 10,000 New York City cabs.
Update: We failed to mention how Visa plans on allowing iPhone users to make these payments, as did Visa in its press release. According to our last article on the topic, iPhones will be fit with a special case that allows them to make payWave payments by including the memory card in the case.
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