Chinese bank card network China UnionPay has announced plans to introduce a mobile-payment service using an NFC-enabled Android phone from HTC.
The phone, reported by Taiwan’s Central News Agency as the HTC Stunning, will enable users to do contactless payments, along with mobile banking and bill payment.
A report in the China-based English-language publication China Daily said the phone could hit the market by September, though that could not be confirmed. It was unclear which banks would participate and if any mobile operators would be part of the project – reports Dan Balaban.
“Mobile phone users no longer have to bring their bank cards in the future because their smartphones can provide the same function,” Chai Hongfeng, executive vice-president of China UnionPay, reportedly said at a news conference in Shanghai yesterday.
He reportedly said that UnionPay plans to begin to deploy mobile payment and related services in about a dozen Chinese cities with local banks. It would use UnionPay’s contactless payment application.
China UnionPay has been drafting specifications to put its payment application on microSD cards in NFC phones, and the new HTC handset might support this, with an antenna built into the handset, not the microSD card. The NFC chip in the handset would be connected to the microSD card slot via some type of single-wire-protocol-like connection. End update.
In a meeting held by UnionPay last April, and attended by representatives of HTC and mobile operators, among other mobile-commerce players in China, HTC discussed plans for an NFC phone supporting the single-wire protocol, or SWP, which could store applications on SIM cards. It’s not clear if the new HTC NFC phone announced in China yesterday is the same one discussed earlier this year.
HTC in January said it invested $5.5 million in mobile-financial services provider Shanghai F-road Commerce Service, and F-road Commerce will reportedly work on the project with HTC and China UnionPay.
“HTC believes that mobile payments will become an indispensable function for smartphones, and we expect to jointly establish a complete industry chain of mobile payments based on such strategic alliances,” Fred Liu, president of HTC engineering and operations, said in the statement, Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported.
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