MasterCard's PayPass contactless payment program is coming to mobile phones, thanks to a field trial that will embed PayPass in Motorola handsets. The phones will use Near Field Communications (NFC) to transmit PayPass information to contactless readers at points of sale, allowing consumers to make payments simply by waving their phone by a reader.

Using cellular phones to make payments is not unheard of in Japan and Korea, but in the United States it has yet to seen just how it will be adopted. In Asia, it's the wireless service providers that lead the effort to embed payment information in phones. In the United States, individual merchant programs headlined early contactless payment efforts — ExxonMobil's SpeedPass for example — but now payment networks are getting heavily involved, said Bruce Cundiff, an analyst with JupiterResearch.

MasterCard is making a big push to make contactless payments ubiquitous in the United States by promoting its PayPass program, in part because of competitive pressure from Visa and American Express, and in part because it wants to sell PayPass to its card issuers as a flexible solution.

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