Paydiant and Bank of America made major headlines yesterday, announcing the launch of a three-month pilot for a QR code-based mobile payments program. PYMNTS.com spoke with Chris Gardner, Paydiant’s co-founder, to discuss why the company chose QR codes as its technology of choice, what it hopes to accomplish with Bank of America, and where he sees mobile payments headed in the future.

When Paydiant and Bank of America announced their QR code-based mobile payments pilot program yesterday, it reinforced a growing industry belief: some may consider NFC to be the future of mobile payments, but QR codes are the here-and-now.

PYMNTS.com spoke with Chris Gardner, co-founder of Paydiant, to discuss why his company uses QR codes, what makes Paydiant’s system so secure, and what it’s like to work with a company of Bank of American’s size and stature.

According to Gardner, the three-month trial period will be available exclusively to bank employees from five branches in North Carolina, but the concept behind the trial will one day provide consumers with a simple and secure way to make in-store mobile payments.

“The cashier would ring up the customer’s total, press a button, and a QR code gets displayed on an LCD screen that represents that transaction. The user launches a BofA app, pushes a button that says, “pay” on it and holds the phone over that QR code to capture it,” Garnder explained. “That talks back to our server, we give them the choice of what card they want to pay with, the consumer picks a card, touches it on the screen, and the transaction is processed. “

When asked why Paydiant uses a QR code system over other technologies, Garnder gave a diplomatic but pointed answer.

“We try not to take sides on QR codes vs. NFC, and I think they both have their merits,” he said. “But at least in the short term, QR codes have enormous advantages.”

To hear more Gardner on what those advantages are and why cloud-based storage systems bring extra security to the mobile payments industry, listen to the full podcast below.

Chris Gardner

Co-Founder of Paydiant

With 20 years in high-technology marketing and product management, Chris’ background spans a variety of technology areas including mobile payments and marketing, e-billing and payments, digital media, customer self-service, document management and speech recognition. Most recently, Chris was the CMO at ExtendMedia, a digital media content delivery and commerce platform software company that was acquired by Cisco in 2010. Prior to that, Chris was the SVP of Products and Marketing at m-Qube, North America’s leading premium SMS mobile payments provider that was acquired by Verisign in 2006. He was also the Vice President of Products and Marketing at edocs Inc., an e-billing, payments and customer self-service company that was acquired by Siebel Systems. Chris’ first foray into mobile began in 1998 when he joined the founders of OmniBrowse, Inc. as the VP of Marketing, and led the launch of its wireless portal that provided real-time data services to wireless devices. OmniBrowse was sold to Microsoft and became part of MSN Mobile. Chris also served as Product Manager for Internet technologies at PC DOCS, as a product manager at Gartner Group and as Corporate Communications Manager at Dragon Systems, a leading speech recognition technology provider. Chris received a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.