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Malaysia's largest mobile-phone operator and bank plan to launch a commercial mobile-payment service using phones that support Near Field Communication, CardLine Global sister publication Cards&Payments has learned. The service would enable users to tap NFC phones to make retail purchases with a bank-issued contactless credit application from Visa Inc. and with Malaysia's Touch 'n Go transit and toll-collection application. Maxis Communications Bhd. and Maybank, along with Touch 'n Go Sdn Bhd, hope to launch the service in January, a source tells Cards&Payments. If they succeed, it could be the world's first NFC service to make it past the trial stage with open-loop, bank-issued payment. Unclear, however, is how many phones supporting NFC would be available for such a rollout. The project could use the new Nokia 6212 NFC phone that has an embedded chip to store applications securely. About 3,000 retail point-of-sales terminals in Malaysia support the Visa payWave application on contactless cards. Those terminals also would accept the phone-based payment. Maxis, Maybank, Touch 'n Go and Visa launched an NFC trial with the same applications in October 2007 in and around the capital city Kuala Lumpur. The trial ended in February. At that time, Maxis said it planned to launch NFC commercially during the second half of 2008 and would expand the service to enable users to download bus routes, timetables, special offers and coupons by tapping their phones against "smart posters" embedded with tiny chip-tags. Touch 'n Go, whose contactless transit and toll cards also enable users to pay parking fares, would take part in the commercial launch. Mobile operators in France and Taiwan also had announced they would roll out NFC mobile payment with bank-issued applications this year, but those projects have been delayed. Telcos and service providers in Austria, Germany and China have launched NFC commercially mainly for transit ticketing, although the projects remain small.
