The Eftpos Payments scheme is to have a crack at instigating mobile phone payments as a real option in Australia, with plans to foster an Eftpos-branded mobile wallet and near field communications widget.Eftpos said it was working with vendor C-SAM (part-owned by MasterCard) on the wallet and NFC widget.Bruce Mansfield, chief executive of Eftpos Payments, said that, in addition to mobile payments, the technology "could also enable new Eftpos services such as offers, loyalty and transfer of receipts."Eftpos will work with developers who have collaborated with C-SAM in the past. It is not, at this stage, looking at an open development platform.Mansfield cited a C-SAM implementation for the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore as a relevant model.He said the mobile wallet and the NFC widget "will be developed as white label products that could potentially be used by a number of Australian retailers or financial institutions."Mansfield said Eftpos will quickly move into proof of concept trials.While much talked about, there is little movement in Australia to make NFC payments a reality. Commonwealth Bank sells a case for an iPhone with an embedded chip that allows users of its Kaching application to make phone-based payments.Visa and Vodafone have also announced plans for a smart pass application that can be used to load value on to a virtual Visa pre-paid card. Visa has also established a partnership with Samsung.ANZ has also foreshadowed plans to introduce a mobile wallet this year, and a trial is underway in Melbourne's Docklands district. Some retailers also have small scale trials under way.NFC technology is becoming more common on Android, BlackBerry and Windows smartphones. Apple, however, has opted to exclude NFC from its latest iPhone.Eftpos, meanwhile, powers along as a preferred payment option.Analysis by MWE Consulting over the monthly RBA payments statistics shows that debit payments (which also include scheme debit) continue to increase their share of the cards payments market. This share reached 41.2 per cent at March 2013, a rise of five percentage points over three years.