American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa board US mobile payments project
This is a major win for the NFC-based consortium, which is being rolled out by AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
Isis was formed last November, and was originally conceived as a proprietary network using its own payments tech to collect and share out payments, and charge fees on every transaction.
But in May it scaled back its ambitions in favour of hosting a mobile wallet as a repository for multiple partners and thus opening up their existing in-store infrastructure.
This left the door open to the credit card giants, and it appears they have now walked through it.
The corsortium's release said: “Isis’ relationships with all four payment networks mean that with Isis-enabled phones and payment terminals in place, merchants and consumers will have ubiquity and freedom of choice when it comes to payment network acceptance.”
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The news really heats up the NFC payments space in the US, with Google Wallet (live now) and Sprint's own wave-and-pay service (live Q4) already confirmed.
Isis is slated to launch in 2012 in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas.
* Interested in the mobile payments space? Download ME's own premium report, Mobile Payments 2011, for an unmissable overview of developments in operator billing, pay-by-mobile, in-app payments, NFC, PayPal on mobile and much more.
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