With the Olympics about to commence and millions of visitors and competitors arriving in London, there has been a certain amount of comment on the prevalence of payments using so-called 'near field communication' (NFC) devices systems and the possibility of 'fuzz' attacks on mobile devices or 'Wallets'.

According to security experts at McAfee, 'fuzzing' involves feeding corrupt or damaged data to an app on a mobile device to discover vulnerabilities. According to McAfee, this can be accomplished in several ways, including text messages and now NFC tags.

Theoretically, a thief could get his hands on a Samsung Galaxy SIII – the phone being issued to all the athletes – and use Mulliner's technology to find vulnerabilities on the phone that would enable them to steal credit card information from other Galaxy SIII's, should he find any exploitable weaknesses, according to McAfee.

Meanwhile, a report from Auriemma Consulting Group (ACG) has found that consumers would choose mobile wallets provided by banks over other non-traditional mobile wallet providers.

ACG's report found that 18.4% of consumers would choose a mobile wallets provided by a bank, while 11.6% of consumers would prefer mobile wallets from digital/mobile payment providers (PayPal, Skrill, Neteller, etc), and 9.5% would get their wallets from mobile operators.

"The mobile wallet is poised to gain strong momentum and usage over upcoming years, so in order to capitalise on the strong consumer interest, banks will need to consider their preferred path moving forward in this space," said ACG.

"Banks can either invest in the development of proprietary mobile wallets, or partner with existing mobile wallet providers to serve as a funding mechanism for the wallet. Non-traditional providers, conversely, need to either prove their experience within the financial services space or partner with existing payment providers."