Payment, wireless industry leaders team up to take NFC Mobile payments into Slovenia

An international consortium of payment and wireless industry leaders on Thursday announced their participation in a field trial being conducted by Banka Koper to bring SIM-based NFC mobile payments to Slovenia.

CASSIS International, INSIDE Contactless, Sagem Orga and Sagem Wireless, in cooperation with Mobitel, the leading mobile service provider in Slovenia, have provided Banka Koper with the payment infrastructure and applications for the trial, which will run through June 2010.

Using their Mobitel handsets, participants in the trial will be able to make purchases at any of the merchant locations in Slovenia that accept MasterCard and Maestro PayPass contactless payment cards.

Trialists will also benefit from a set of interactive mobile services based on "smart posters," including contextual information, advertisements and coupons.

"This pilot gathers state of the art technologies from leaders in the industry," said Gojmir Nabergoj, senior advisor at Banka Koper. "We aim to leverage smart card and mobile technologies to enable simpler and more secure payments, and to offer value added products which really makes a difference to their customers."

Banka Koper's payment service will be provisioned over-the-air onto a single-wire protocol SIM card. Both the MasterCard M/Chip application and Mobitel's single-wire protocol NFC SIM card have been developed by Sagem Orga. The NFC-compliant Mobitel handset, manufactured by Sagem Wireless, incorporates INSIDE's MicroRead NFC solution, which handles communication with NFC terminals, tags and other NFC handsets, and also includes INSIDE'sWave-Me applet for interaction with smart posters.

"Mobitel has extensive experience of innovative mobile services, especially in the field of payment," said Jagodi Marko, service unit manager at Mobitel. "Thanks to our industrial partners we were able to create a new experience of mobile payment."