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Visa Inc. says it is moving beyond the trial stage with contactless mobile payment with the launch today of a "commercial" service by Malaysia's largest mobile operator Maxis Communications Bhd that enables consumers to buy phones off the shelf and download Visa's payWave contactless application to them. Consumers will be able to tap the phones, supported by Near Field Communication technology, at any of 1,800 merchant locations that accept payWave cards, mainly in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian bank Maybank Bhd will issue the credit application. Consumers also will be able to download Malaysia's Touch 'n Go contactless mass transit fare-collection application, which they can use to pay highway tolls and make some retail purchases. And they will be able to tap "smart posters" containing NFC chips to download promotional offers or other content over the network. "For the first time, consumers can walk into a Maxis store, purchase a device and, while they are in the store, personalize the device and download the Visa PayWave application," a Visa Inc. spokesperson tells Cards&Payments, a CardLine sister publication. "As we look to commercialize these services, we're looking for certain pieces to fall into place." One of those pieces is availability of NFC mobile phones, and that is a problem for Visa and its partners in Malaysia and elsewhere. The commercial launch in Malaysia involves only one mid-priced NFC phone, the Nokia 6212, a model the Finland-based handset maker introduced last year. It remains one of perhaps only two NFC phone models on the market. Maxis ordered just 3,000 phones for the launch, the Visa spokesperson confirms. Austrian operator Mobilkom put an earlier Nokia NFC model on sale to the general public starting in 2007 as part of a mobile-ticketing service, selling only about 15,000 of them. And branches of giant telecommunications company China Mobile in Xiamen, Guangzhou and Beijing also have sold an NFC model for transit ticketing and related retail purchases, though consumers have bought relatively few. But the Malaysian launch is the first NFC project past the trial stage involving a major credit card brand. Visa wanted to announce the launch before rival MasterCard Worldwide announces a large NFC trial in Bangalore, India, that could come within the next week, a source tells Cards&Payments. Maxis was undeterred by the availability of only one handset model for its subscribers. "They want to be the first, and they want to make sure they can at least retain their customers," says Thian Yee Chua, CEO of Singapore-based Cassis International, the main technology vendor on the project. "Definitely, in the long term, there should be revenue to be made for them. They certainly will not throw money out the window." Malaysian consumers will be able to download the payWave application and others over the mobile network within 90 seconds of requesting them, Chua says.
