Bank of America Corp. is preparing to enroll customers in a mobile payments trial that will enable them to use multiple payment brands' cards.
The trial is an expansion of an employee test the Charlotte, N.C., bank conducted in the fall in New York and is intended to "provide a deeper understanding" of how customers prefer to enable "their phones to serve as a wallet," Tara Burke, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, said Monday.
The trial will include an undisclosed number of customers in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco starting on March 28 and will last three months, Burke said.
American Banker first reported in January that B of A planned to expand its New York trial of a Visa Inc. mobile payments system to the additional cities and open it up to customers. The technology news website BGR.com reported Friday that the bank was sending invitations to customers to participate in the trial and posted screen shots of the invitations stating that participants needed either a Bank of America Visa-branded debit card or MasterCard Inc.-branded credit card to use with the mobile wallet application.
For B of A's expanded trial, the application will work with several BlackBerry models but the plan also is to eventually include the iPhone, Burke said.
B of A is one of several large Visa card issuers that were known to be working with the San Francisco payments network on mobile payments trials using microSD technology from DeviceFidelity Inc. Wells Fargo & Co., U.S. Bancorp and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have also said they plan to test the technology, which works by adding contactless payment functions to a memory chip the user can install.
Burke declined to comment on any payment networks involved in B of A's trial. A spokeswoman for MasterCard confirmed it is working with B of A.
