Get ready for the “next big thing” in mobile payments.
According to published reports Monday, NFC-enabled payments will soon be possible from your Lenovo laptop.
Mobile Payments Today reports that an embedded NFC reader will be included on some forthcoming models of Lenovo’s ThinkPad tablets and Ultrabook laptops.
Customers will be able to simply tap an NFC-enabled mobile device or contactless credit card to pay for online transactions.
As of this writing, there’s been no confirmation of potential payment partnerships with Lenovo, but strong suspicions suggest MasterCard is a likely if not probable partner.
“One likely partner is MasterCard,” today’s report reads. “When Intel made its November 2011 announcement about the release of the Ultrabook — a line of thin, fast notebook computers built on Intel technology — the company also announced a ‘strategic collaboration’ with MasterCard to pair the card association’s PayPass contactless payment technology Intel identity protection technology that combines hardware with two-factor authentication to secure user data.”
I never used mobile NFC payment before using one of my mobile devices. But perhaps once the technique improves such as being able to pay without passing it through some kind of scanner that can be hacked I would use it earlier.