Visa and Samsung previews NFC payments app for London 2012 Games

Visa and Samsung have revealed the official mobile payments app for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Designed to work with Samsung’s yet-to-be-announced ‘Official Olympic Phone’ (Galaxy S3 maybe?) the app will support contactless payments and uses Visa’s payWave technology.

Customers using the app will be able to tap to pay at point of purchase terminals, with any transactions over £15 requiring entry of PIN code. The app will also let you check your balance at a glance and review your purchase history.

“Samsung is extremely thrilled to work with Visa to launch mobile payment services for the London 2012 Olympic Games. We believe that this showcase will motivate people to experience and adopt easy and safe payment through mobile devices,” said DJ Lee, executive vice president and head of Sales and Marketing team of Samsung’s Mobile Communications Business.

Thought the service will be showcased on a Samsung device at the Games, Sandra Alzetta, Head of Innovation at Visa Europe said in a statement that the app will eventually come to other phones:

“We are also working with a number of partners to put live mobile payment technology into consumer hands. We’ve recently announced the certification of a number of major manufacturer handsets for NFC payments, which brings mainstream commercial mobile payments a step closer to reality.”

We already know that as well as Samsung phones, LG and BlackBerry phones have been certified for Visa payWave compatibility.

Terminal velocity

In other Samsung-NFC news, we know that there’s going to be NFC’d versions of the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 and Samsung Galaxy Mini 2 coming to market.

We assumed that these’d play ball with this app too, but it might just be the flagship Olympic phone that gets the NFC limelight. For London 2012, there will be more than 3,000 contactless terminals set up across Olympic and Paralympic venues showcasing tap-to-pay mobile technologies.

In time we’d expect to see the service rolling out to other NFC-enabled phones, regardless of manufacturer or OS.