Intuit's GoPayment provides merchants with an app and piece of plastic that plugs into smartphones to turn them into card swipes for processing payments.

The product is aimed at the millions of small American merchants that do not accept credit cards and competes with similar offerings from VeriFone and Square, which recently received investment from Visa.

However, in a "concept demo" Intuit is looking forward to dumping the hardware and plastic card and instead using Google's Android mobile platform and NFC technology to transfer credit card data via radio waves.

Customers could pay for products using a virtual debit card residing on their phone. To complete the purchase, or receive a receipt, they would touch handsets with the merchant. Small business owners could also use the system for inventory, tapping their phones against a product with a smart tag to transfer its information to the app.



Chris Hylen, general manager, payment solutions division, Intuit, says: "With GoPayment we are exploring every avenue for innovation that best meets our customers' needs, and this includes technologies such as NFC that are still in the early stages of adoption."