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A new attachment that turns iPhones into payment devices is expected to get its first test drive from Visa employees this quarter, with banks to follow.

DeviceFidelity Inc. today officially unveiled the attachment, which features a slot for the company’s contactless microSD card, In2Pay. The card will carry a Visa payWave application. Users would be able to tap their iPhones to pay at point-of-sale terminals that accept payWave. They would be able to download an iPhone app to their phones that would serve as the user interface for the payment service.

The protective case that fits over the back of the phone containing the microSD slot will be rubberized, NFC Times has learned. Since DeviceFidelity and Visa intend for consumers to keep the attachment on their phones all the time, it comes with a micro-USB slot for consumers to use to charge their phones or sync data.

DeviceFidelity and Visa Inc. had announced the attachment earlier this month, but the press release and related video was pulled abruptly, apparently because it was released prematurely. A video posted earlier today on YouTube shows a baseball fan in Visa’s home base of San Francisco talking about the convenience of leaving his wallet at home and paying for refreshments at the ballpark for his three kids. The video notes users can protect the payment application with passwords.

Visa in February first announced it was working with DeviceFidelity to market microSDs packing payWave for use in many phones that sport microSD slots.

That, however, left out the popular iPhone, which has no built-in slot. DeviceFidelity’s attachment remedies that situation.

“All the banks have iPhone (mobile-banking) applications,” Dave Wentker, head of mobile contactless payments at Visa Inc., told NFC Times. “This is a natural complement.”

Wentker said the trials with the iPhone attachment would begin with employees. Those trials may already have gotten underway or will do so soon, since the first trials of the attachment are scheduled to begin during the second quarter. Banks will also hold trials with the attachment, as they will with the payWave microSD cards that fit into slots in other mobile phones. Banks could issue the microSD cards directly to their customers or the consumers could buy them in stores. Banks could download and manage the payment applications over the air on the cards, with the help of technology vendors.

UPDATE: Deepak Jain, head of DeviceFidelity, told NFC Times the attachment is ready for orders, but to be used for payment, Visa would first have to certify that the microSD cards with payWave onboard work with particular phones and communicate properly with payWave point-of-sale terminals, said Wentker. The certification process is in progress, noted Jain. DeviceFidelity has an exclusive deal with Visa.

Those terminals and contactless readers are designed to read contactless bank cards, which have a longer range than the microSD cards. DeviceFidelity’s In2Pay card, like contactless microSDs from such competitors as U.S.-based Tyfone, embed a tiny antenna in the memory cards. The cards draw extra power from the phones to send the transaction data to POS terminals. The antennas in the microSD cards are too small to draw enough power from the readers alone to transmit the data.

Some observers, however, wonder whether the contactless microSD will be able to transmit data smoothly, even with the power boost from the phones. Consumers might have to tap their phones more than once after repositioning it to communicate with readers.

UPDATE: The DeviceFidelity attachment is one of a relatively small number of peripherals of any kind for the iPhone that has gained certification from the phone's maker, Apple. When it comes to payment, there are a couple of swipe readers for magnetic stripe cards that can be used by mobile merchants, including one called Square from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

UPDATE: It’s unclear when another iPhone attachment designed to support contactless payment applications, iCarte, which was announced last November by Canada-based Wireless Dynamics, would be available. But company CEO Ambrose Tam told NFC Times that the company is in the process of gaining certification from Apple as well as from Visa and MasterCard Worldwide, which has taken longer than expected. But he said he expects to get the certifications by mid-June.

"We target to have iCarte available by the end of June (or) early July," he said. 

A company Web site devoted solely to the iCarte is temporarily closed. But Tam explained that the site is awaiting approval from Apple after the company requested Wireless Dynamics to add new legal wording to the site.