AT&T Wants To Turn Your iPhone Into A Discover Card

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500x_iphonepay

Say goodbye to that wedge of magnetized plastic in your wallet. If AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have their way, the future of credit is your smartphone… and they are going to war against the likes of Visa and Mastercard to accomplish it.

According to Bloomberg, the three carriers are working with Discover and Barclays, testing a system in four US cities that would enable special smartphones embedded with NFC (near field communication) chips to make credit card payments with just a wave of the hand.

Making a credit card payment from your iPhone isn’t exactly a new idea: Visa already lets you do this with special payWave cases, and Digg founder Kevin Rose is backing Square, which is a similar idea.

The point here, though, is that it’s the carriers who are making the most concerted push yet to consolidate and bring ubiquity to smartphone payment systems, by cutting out the biggest credit giants entirely.

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