The Spreading Digital tentacles of lifestyle | Advantage zyaada

After years of swiping that highly volatile status symbol that supplied oodles of credit to households, Visa power has finally subscribed to doing away with the cards. Starting next week ( September ’10) Visa will roll out a new payment lifestyle for subscribers on latest launch till the Holiday season gets over in December 2010 with Bank of America customers in New York. Later it will also roll the pilot with US Bancorp. Thanks Techland

Reuters reports

Customers would then “bump” their phones with point-of-sale devices in stores — actually they need only wave the phones near the devices — and their bank account data would be collected and their purchases completed.

Bank of America declined to say how many people would be involved in the pilot, and a company spokeswoman declined to comment on Visa’s involvement.

Visa spokeswoman Elvira Swanson said the Bank of America pilot was not larger than the company’s other mobile trials, but she said it could have a more powerful impact on the market than some previous pilots.

Unfortunately the pogram requires users to install new hardware on their smartphones, which does not sound like the smart thing to do for amenable users who would want to migrate to a non invasive lifestyle that does make paying and carrying digital id easy for them, no unwieldy wallets, no embarrasments at forgeting things at home / in the car.