The land-grab for mobile phone payments continues, with Commonwealth Bank releasing the latest version of its smartphone banking application yesterday. The app will allow customers to make payments by tapping the phone against contactless payment terminals worldwide.Like Westpac, which made a similar announcement a day earlier for Android smartphone users, the service is reliant on the latest version of Google's operating system known as KitKat. Although there are early versions of the operating system now in circulation, it is not expected to be widely available before early 2014.Like Westpac, Commonwealth Bank's plans centre largely around the Samsung Galaxy 4 smartphone, which comes with a near field communications chip. The most modern versions of this phone feature the new operating system, but older models will need to download the newer version of the operating system in early 2014 to take advantage of the contactless payment capability of the app.By embedding a secure element on the NFC chip, both CBA and Westpac have found it possible to securely store the EMV data from contactless payment cards on phones, which then allows contactless payments to be made directly from phones.Unlike Westpac, which is planning to offer its customers a choice of Visa payWave or MasterCard PayPass cards, CBA is offering just the MasterCard option.CBA has also released a Windows 8 version of the application, and will release an updated iPhone app early in the New Year, although the lack of an embedded iPhone NFC chip will mean consumers will have to affix a $2.99 NFC sticker to their iPhone to use the contactless capability. ANZ, meanwhile, continues to trial a smartphone contactless payment application, while NAB has released Flik, its payment application, which allows two NFC-enabled phones to tap each other to transmit payment information.