Although MasterCard’s (News - Alert) head of emerging payments, Ed McLaughlin, never mentioned Apple by name during his interview with Fast Company, he seemed to drop hints that the next-generation iPhones would contain NFC technology. “I don’t know of a handset manufacturer,” McLaughlin said, “that isn’t in process of making sure that their stuff is PayPass ready.”

More than 150,000 merchants offer MasterCard’s PayPass tap-to-go payments to their customers. Many Android phones are also equipped with Google (News - Alert) Wallet. However, the technology that enables these products, near field communications (NFC) has yet to be widely used in the United States.

Fast Company asked McLaughlin whether the contactless payment industry needs Apple (News - Alert) in order to launch.“Anytime someone with a major base moves forward, it advances what you're doing. So of course,” McLaughlin replied. “Now, when we have discussions with our partners, and they ask us not to disclose them, we don't.”

Fast Company also reported on January 17 that Visa has been in discussions with Apple regarding their PayWave system, which is similar to MasterCard’s PayPass. “I can’t tell you when Apple is going to put NFC on the next version of the iPhone (News - Alert),” said Bill Gajda, Visa’s global head of Mobile Product. “But we've had discussions with them around the PayWave standard and they've asked to look at our specification and certification process so that when they decide to do something those lines of communication are open.”

NFC uses technology similar to what consumers would find in a security tag at a retail store. Security tags send radio waves to sensors in stores, causing alarms to sound when a tag passes within the vicinity of the sensor. The technology, called radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the same technology that enables NFC.

On NFC-equipped Android phones, customers store credit card information in Google Wallet. If they want to make a credit card payment at an NFC-equipped payment station, they simply tap their smartphone against the payment kiosk. The NFC chip extracts the credit card information from Google Wallet and transmits it to the retailer’s POS system.

Apple has not yet announced a release date for the iPhone 5. However, manufacturer Foxconn has confirmed that iPhone production is currently underway. If Apple maintains its usual six-month turnaround time, then the launch would occur sometime in June or July.

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