Google is getting one step closer to offering mobile payment on Android devices by partnering up with MasterCard and Citigroup.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is hoping to boost advertising revenue trough the service, which allows customers to pay for purchases by activating a mobile-payment application and waving their smartphones in front of a special reader. Google will then collect the information on purchases and provide them to retailers so that they can have more information about their customers and be able to target them better with ads and discount offers.

The mobile payment service, part of Near Field Technology is still in its early stages of development, but is expected to be released sometime this year, says Computerworld. Citigroup would then allow credit and debit-card holding customers to pay with their smartphones which would have an NFC radio chip inside, at over 150,000 NFC terminals already in place across the U.S.

NFC technology has long been implemented in Japan, parts of Asia and Europe but has yet to take a strong foothold in the U.S. At this year’s Mobile World Congress this year many companies including Samsung, Research in Motion, and Nokia confirmed that they would embed NFC chips into their devices next year, reports PCmag.

Even if NFC mobile payment system seems like a convenient way to pay, some may fear that it’s not secure, but according to the WSJ, credit card companies will pay for unauthorized transactions, making it just as secure as a credit card, maybe more.

“Because it’s contact-less there’s a perception people can grab it from thin air, but it’s actually a more sophisticated technology than credit cards with a magnetic stripe, making it more difficult to steal a consumer’s payment information,” said Nick Holland, a mobile-transactions analyst at Yankee Group to the WSJ.