Pay by phone
They have joined 14 operators including Orange, SingTel and Vodafone and backed by MasterCard, and will run trials beginning in October.
The idea is to define a common global approach to using Near Field Communications technology to link mobile devices with payment systems to make secure and transparent credit and debit payments.
“After several fragmented initiatives, the mobile phone industry is now uniting around a single approach to enabling the mobile phone to be used, instead of cash or plastic credit card, at point of sale,” said Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association, which represents 700 operators.
“The support of the world’s leading mobile operators and handset manufacturers should ensure that Pay-Buy Mobile is adopted worldwide, enabling vendors to achieve economies of scale and consumers to eventually use their mobile phones to pay for goods and services wherever they travel.”
The Pay-Buy Mobile initiative will build on work by the credit card companies, which have developed specifications to ensure global interoperability between chip cards and point of sale terminals, regardless of manufacturer, the bank or the location of the sale.
“Thanks to the growing momentum behind this initiative, we are confident that we can build a global mobile payment infrastructure that is both highly convenient and highly secure for consumers,” said Young-Chu Cho, CEO of the Korean operator KTF, which is leading the initiative.
Cellphone-based payments are already becoming common in South Korea.
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