Finnish Firm Works With Thai Bank On NFC Test

Venyon Oy , which sells Near Field Communication technology, said Tuesday it is working with Kasikornbank, a financial institution based in Thailand, on an NFC-payment test. The bank launched the trial  in Bangkok. Participants can use Nokia 6216 mobile phones to make retail purchases at about 1,000 merchant locations. Charges are applied to their credit card accounts, Finland-based Venyon says in a statement. Neither company said how many consumers are participating or how long the trial will last, and immediate comment was unavailable. Banks, card organizations, transit agencies, merchants and mobile operators globally are testing NFC for contactless payments, ticketing and data transfers, but wide rollouts appear at least a year away, mostly because of the lack of mobile handsets enabled with NFC chips. Finland-based Nokia Corp. and Germany-based smart card vendor Giesecke & Devrient established Venyon to manage NFC applications.