In the future, mobile phones will take a lot of weight from your wallet. As well as being your digital camera, diary and internet portal, mobiles could take the place of your cash and credit cards, too.

A tap of the phone near the cash register will serve to debit a customer’s account – either using pre-pay or from the bank direct - a swipe at the train station will make the barriers swing open, much in the way an Oyster card does now, and waving it in front of a scanner at a club will confirm the owner is a member.

That is the vision of researchers at the major handset manufacturers and technology companies, who are racing to develop ways for phones to interact in a more sophisticated fashion with their surrounds.

The revolution in so-called ‘near-field-communication’ (NFC), as the technology is called, is potentially so wide-reaching that more than 100 companies, including major players MasterCard, Visa, Microsoft, Sony and Nokia, have now signed up to the organisation which is in charge of developing standards.

During a trial, in which Nokia is currently involved in New York, participants are using their phones to ride the subway and buy goods from a range of stores, including pharmacies.

British mobile phone companies are also experimenting with the technology, although none will confirm when it will be introduced on a large scale.

To make a payment - a video demonstration of which is available here - the phone would be brought to within 2cm of the Visa terminal, which would recognise it as belonging to a particular bank customer.

The customer would confirm the amount to be paid on the phone screen, enter their PIN on the handset, before seeing the payment debited - either from a pre-paid cash account or from the customer’s account, using the regular payment network.

Gerhard Romen, head of market development for NFC at Nokia said: “When you think about it, the security offered by a card is built upon two things: something you have – the card – and something you know – the password.

“Both these criteria can be met by the phone. The credentials identifying the customer are passed through the air to the terminal, and the password can obviously also be entered.”

Only a small number of handsets currently have NFC technology built-in, but in a couple of years' it will become as widespread as Bluetooth, according to industry experts.

It’s not just store payments that stand to be revolutionised.

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