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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Mexican bank Banamex is beginning a rollout of contactless payment and plans to have 12,000 contactless terminals and about 1 million debit and credit cards deployed by the end of the year in and around Mexico City, according to MasterCard Worldwide and point-of-sale terminal vendor VeriFone.

Point-of-sale terminal supplier VeriFone is the second major POS terminal vendor to announce a deal to support PayPal’s in-store payment system in its devices.

The Isis mobile operator joint venture has announced that four major point-of-sale terminal and contactless reader vendors have licensed its mobile-commerce application, as the venture gears up for its soft launch in two cities this summer.

The senior director of financial services for Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics chain in the United States, said she believes NFC holds great promise but fears costs will be daunting, standards are insufficient and the chain’s customer data might be used to benefit competitors.

While U.S.-based Vivotech has not been profitable during its first 10 years, investors in its latest funding round apparently believe the vendor is well-positioned to take advantage of the Google-style push for NFC-based mobile commerce.

U.S.-based Intuit is demonstrating an NFC mobile-payment application for Android NFC phones that it says could enable small merchants to accept credit card payments with a tap of their phones on the NFC phones of customers.

France-based point-of-sale terminal vendor Ingenico today announced it has agreed to buy the U.S. POS terminal business of competing vendor Hypercom, in anticipation of NFC rollouts.

U.S.-based vendor Vivotech could be making a play for a share of the point-of-sale terminal market and the hoped-for boom in NFC-based mobile commerce at the physical point of sale in the United States.

About 25% to 30% of merchant locations in the United States will need to be covered by contactless terminals if service providers and mobile operators hope to get consumers interested in tapping their NFC phones for retail transactions, says POS terminal vendor VeriFone.