Paying for gear via your mobile phone is something that is going to get bigger and bigger as time moves on. Such as startups like Square and more established firms such as VeriFone are trying to deliver personal mobile payments to your iPhone and other mobile devices.

However, according to an article over on unwired view, those companies and others like them need to start looking towards other platforms than the iPhone as an Apple patent has revealed Apple is working on their own mobile payment for the iPhone and iPad.

Apple’s patent application is called Peer to peer financial transaction devices and methods, and apparently describes an iPhone application and service which enables the iPhone user to store all bank/checking account, credit card and other information on their iPhone and make business and personal transactions by just a few taps.

Furthermore, payments can apparently be made via linking NFC enabled iPhone handsets or using the iPhone camera and image recognition tech. At present it is only a paten but Apple does have dealings with small payment processing business with their iTunes store so utilising that experience and extending it to personal payment via the iPhone could be the next logical step