In a Monday announcement, US credit card giant Visa said that it has worked out a global alliance for mobile payments with Samsung, for giving shoppers the benefit of making payments by waving their smartphones near a special reader.

According to Visa, the key advantage of its mobile payments-related global alliance with Samsung would give a notable boost to the long-hyped use of smartphones for making worldwide payments for goods; sans any physical contact, and with no need for cash or credit cards.

The mobile payments system which Visa has worked out with Samsung will essentially allow the owners of Samsung smartphones featuring the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, which makes the handset capable of transmitting information to a nearby reader without touching it.

In a statement pertaining to the Visa-Samsung alliance, Visa Europe VP Mariano Dima said: "A Samsung device equipped with the Visa contactless payment service is a powerful proposition and will allow us to make mobile payments a reality for people around the world."

Despite the fact that the success of the Visa-Samsung mobile-payments alliance will largely depend on whether banks can be persuaded to use it, Visa - drawing attention to ABI Research's projections that 1.95 billion NFC-enabled devices will be shipped in 2017 - said that the alliance had the potential to "significantly accelerate" the availability of mobile payments worldwide.