The weblog ‘Putting people first’ links to three interesting papers from CHI 2008 on mobile payments.
From meiwaku to tokushita!
Lessons for digital money design from Japan. Mainwaring, S., March, W., and Maurer, B. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

“As an example of ubiquitous computing in the [...]

A while ago some interesting projects attached passive RFID tags to ordinary mobile phones to enable participation within RFID-based ticketing, payment or infrastructure.
I wrote about this way of retro-fitting mobile phones with RFID. Simply attaching passive RFID tags to mobile handsets allows new functions to be added without integration into the phone itself. This [...]

Another video demonstrating NFC technology. Look past the promotional spin and there are a lot of interesting clips of various NFC technologies in use.

Felica is developed by Sony and is compatible with NFC standards.

The near-future success of NFC depends on the usability of mobile payments and ticketing. As interaction designers we of course argue that the success hinges on good design of this experience and recent news suggests that there is little to recommend mobile payments unless they offer some useful new features (see Place and product based [...]

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

It is likely that NFC has a role to play in the future of our interactions with infrastructures like payment, ticketing and access. But it is clear that mobile phones offer a different interface and experience to cash, cards, wallets and [...]