There's still plenty of skepticism about NFC-enabled mobile payments, but Boston-based mobile payment start-up LevelUp is hopping on the bandwagon. The company announced today (in its usual less-than-serious fashion) that its next generation countertop units will not only support purchases using its familiar QR codes, but will now support purchases from phones using NFC technologies.

"It’s always been super important to us to make LevelUp work for any and every consumer on the planet,” said Seth Priebatsch, LevelUp's "chief ninja." Our goal is to have LevelUp be the universal way to pay with whatever phone you may have, at whatever place you may be, whatever carrier you're on, whatever card you want to use and whatever tech you prefer."

Priebatsch said the company's philosophy means being as open as possible to both consumer technologies and merchant point-of-sale systems to make the experience as simple as possible.

According to LevelUp, the impetus for including NFC in its point of sale equipment is the possibility (which the company predicts is "absolutely positively … probably" 100 percent likely) that NFC will be included in the next generation iPhone coming out this month. (LevelUp said it used a combination of Farmer's Almanacs, unicorns and Mayan descendants to forecast the likelihood of an NFC-enabled next-generation iPhone. If nothing else, the company has a sense of humor.)

And if the iPhone doesn't include NFC? No matter. LevelUp said its payment experience is all about value far beyond just the transaction. So however consumers want to pay, LevelUp will support it.

The new NFC-accepting hardware will be available to merchants at no charge, same as the old hardware. And merchants will still have zero interchange fees for transactions routed through LevelUp. 

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