Deutsche Telekom has launched MyWallet, an NFC service that allows customers with any of 18 supported Samsung and Sony Android NFC devices to make payments at MasterCard PayPass merchants. The service is live in Germany today, will be launched in Slovakia this month and in Hungary later this year.
In Germany, supermarket chains Hit and Edeka are to begin issuing digital coupons that users can store in their MyWallet from June 2014. Transit and event tickets, membership and loyalty points are all to be added “in the future”, with the city of Bonn selected as the carrier’s main testbed for new applications.
MyWallet is launching in Germany with a single supported payment card — the MyWallet Card — a prepaid MasterCard issued by Deutsche Telekom’s London-based ClickandBuy International subsidiary.
Customers who sign up for the service will get an introductory bonus of up to €40, a companion card that can be used to make purchases at merchants not equipped to accept contactless payments, and a free NFC SIM card.
All MyWallet-capable NFC phones supplied by the carrier will ship with an NFC-enabled SIM from now on, Deutsche Telekom says, and contactless stickers are being made available to customers without an NFC phone.
The carrier is using Giesecke & Devrient’s SkySIM CX SIM cards for the NFC rollout. G&D is also supplying the MasterCard PayPass payment application.
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An entire article talking about “NFC” without a single mention of what on earth “NFC” actually is.
Near Field Communication – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication
Thank you.
A fair comment for any other site, but this is “NFC World”. It’s all about NFC. They can’t be expected to explain everything from first principles in every post.
I linked here from Google News, knowing nothing of this site’s reputation(?). Without trying to sound arrogant in any way, I’m also a journalist, and I’m quite careful to explain all acronyms at least once in full text near the start of any article. I expected the same, that is all.
It is indeed best practice to explain in full at first mention, and something that we always try to do. You’ll see it happening a lot in our coverage of host card emulation (HCE) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) at the moment, at least until they are judged to be ubiquitous.
However, @Nev is quite right that we decided not to do it for NFC as now, after 3,500 articles, it would be starting to get just a little wearing for our regular readers. 🙂