Pay-Buy Mobile initiative gets underway with major backing

The mobile payment space continued to gain steam as Nokia Corp. and 10 network operators joined an effort by the GSM Association to allow consumers to pay with their phones at retail outlets.
European and Asian network operators KPN, O2, Orange, SingTel, Vodafone Group plc and others announced their support for “Pay-Buy Mobile,” an initiative launched in February aimed at establishing a standard for wireless payments using Near Field Communications technology. Other backers include Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and LG Electronics Co. Ltd. as well as AT&T Inc., China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo Inc, Telenor and TeliaSonera. MasterCard is also behind the effort.
While U.S. financial institutions are beginning to deploy services that allow users to transfer funds and access account information over their phones, efforts to market a “mobile wallet” that can be used at the point of sale have generally failed to move beyond the trial phase in the United States. The GSMA hopes to create an entire ecosystem for the space including carriers, banks, handset makers and retailers.
Trials with the new standard are slated to launch in October.
“After several fragmented initiatives, the mobile phone industry is now uniting around a single approach to enabling the mobile phone to be used, instead of cash or plastic credit card, at point of sale,” said GSMA CEO Rob Conway. “The support of the world’s leading mobile operators and handset manufacturers should ensure that Pay-Buy Mobile is adopted worldwide, enabling vendors to achieve economies of scale and consumers to eventually use their mobile phones to pay for goods and services wherever they travel.”