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The U.K. will see a cloud-based digital wallet service this year, according to Visa. A post on Marketing Week cites Marc O'Brien, managing director of Visa U.K. and Ireland, saying that Visa is also looking at a mainstream launch for NFC services throughout the countries.
"Building momentum from the Olympic Games, we're looking to roll out of the [contactless payment] cards and handsets this year [2013]," O'Brien said in the article. "We're also working on a digital wallet for cloud-based e-commerce and that's coming here [U.K.] too this year."
Additionally, O'Brien conceded that Visa's initial approach to NFC payments, starting with small merchants, wasn't the right environment to drive large scale adoption. Instead, large brands will drive volume, he said.
"The other markets across Europe have learnt from that lesson and in the U.K. we're playing catch-up," O'Brien said. "We are second in terms of take-up and that's not good enough. In 2013 we want to become the number one market again."
Visa has been promoting contactless mobile payments in the U.K. for some time, most recently partnering with the Olympic games to push mobile payments in and around the venues of the 2012 London games.
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