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NFC Times Exclusive: As part of an apparent shake-up at Visa Inc., Bill Gajda, head of mobile, and Jennifer Schulz, responsible for the V.me wallet, are out, while the company appears to have sidelined former head of product Jim McCarthy and put global executive Elizabeth Buse back into her former position, NFC Times has learned.

BARCELONA – Visa and Samsung Electronics have announced a landmark agreement that will see a Visa payWave application preloaded on the embedded secure elements in forthcoming NFC-enabled Samsung devices.

PayPal has an advantage over another big Internet player, Google, in rolling out payments at the physical point of sale because it already has tens of millions of payments customers on file with billions in their accounts “ready to spend,” contends Don Kingsborough, PayPal’s vice president for retail and prepaid products.

Google is expected to make a major announcement next week related to its Google Wallet, NFC Times has learned.

The chief of smart card supplier and trusted service manager Gemalto is predicting a fast-growing market for TSM services and noted the services were already contributing to profit.

Visa, American Express and Discover Financial Services have agreed to work with Google to enable consumers to put their payment applications into future versions of the Google Wallet, which the Web giant launched today.

Visa Inc. has announced a major new migration plan to encourage U.S. merchants to support EMV chip technology, including incentives for accepting contactless cards and NFC-phone payments.

While there is much anticipation that consumers will routinely pay with their mobile phones, representatives of Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide–along with their would-be challenger, the telco-led Isis joint venture–say they know most consumers will need to be convinced to use their phones to pay.

Visa Inc. has promoted the head of its North American bank sales unit and a former IBM employee to global head of product, the top executive post overseeing innovation, including NFC and contactless payment, among many other duties.

Two makers of newly developed contactless microSD cards are moving their products toward market trials, as their big U.S. payments patrons–Visa Inc. and First Data Corp.–seek to capitalize on growing demand from banks, as well as from mobile operators.