Who says you have to be a network carrier, manufacture smartphones, or even develop a smartphone operating system, in order to be at the forefront of smartphone infrastructure? Amazon’s been making some serious inroads to becoming a key player in the smartphone world with the launch of its own Appstore and mobile music-streaming service, and now the company is reportedly considering getting its foot in the door early in the field of NFC-based payments.

The company already has mature payment-processing systems set up, thanks to its own online retailing as well as fielding transactions for others through Amazon Payments. Amazon could even leverage its existing Android apps, already capable of handling payments, to provide NFC-based transactions as an afterthought, though a stand-alone app may be called for depending on the complexity of the system Amazon comes up with.

Earlier this week we heard about Google’s potential plans with MasterCard and Citigroup to process NFC payments without collecting any fees, just using the transaction logs to gather data for improving ad placement. There’s no word yet on just what Amazon has in mind, but we imagine it would be interested in taking a share of those fees. Bloomberg, reporting on the subject, expects Amazon to decide how it’s going to proceed in the next three to five months, so hopefully we’ll have heard more about its NFC plans by the end of summer.

Source: Bloomberg