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More and more people now are paying for the fries they bought at McDonald’s using their smartphones. Soon, people will be doing it at gas pumps everywhere. Just recently, Visa and Chevron revealed an initiative to bring some of the first gas pumps enabled with mobile payment technology to the state of California.
Beginning in autumn of this year, mobile users will be able to take full advantage of Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, or Google’s Android Pay to pay for gas at over 20 Chevron stations around the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley. For Chevron, this may be considered an important step forward for the company, who began exploring the concept of gas pumps enabled with mobile payment technology in December of last year. Of course, the partnership with Visa is significant, too. Like Chevron, Visa welcomes the idea of paying via mobile means in the near future, and considering that mobile payment systems are already put in place in specific stores in the United States, bringing them to gas pumps makes a lot of sense.
Sure, mobile payment technology is already present in many gas stations around the country, but until now, efforts to bring the tech outside to gas pumps are rather minimal. A couple of years ago in 2013, ExxonMobil launched the Speedpass+ mobile app for selected American gas stations; while this year, Shell joined forces with PayPal in creating the Fill Up & Go mobile app for use in the United Kingdom. The two mobile apps mentioned above make use of QR codes, which require mobile users to snap pictures of codes at gas pumps in order to authorize their payments.
However, in the case of the Chevron stations in California, they will be making use of near field communications (NFC) technology, which only lets mobile users tap their handsets on a panel at the gas pump, instead of snapping pictures of codes. Specifically, the new Chevron pumps will let consumers pay using any major credit card or bank card, not just Visa.
Mobile payment technology is not actually new. Various modes of contactless modes of payment have been around for years, but consumers have been generally not interested (or reluctant) in making use of them. But in recent months, mobile payments have experienced a surge in popularity, especially now that Apple, Samsung, and Google have introduced their own take on the technology. Research firm IDC now thinks that global mobile payments will hit $1 trillion by 2017, which is easily more than twice the total value of this year’s.
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