MasterCard, Weve team up to launch mobile payment system

PanARMENIAN.Net - Weve, the mobile wallet and marketing joint venture of the UK’s biggest mobile carriers, has announced a partnership with MasterCard that it hopes will accelerate the readiness of stores to take mobile payments, Gigaom reported.

The idea of Weve, which launched last year after EU antitrust regulators gave it the all-clear (its members include Vodafone, EE and O2, but not Three UK), is to provide a clearinghouse for advertisers, retailers and banks who want to deal with phone users. If that provides a single point of contact on the carriers’ side, the MasterCard deal is intended to do something similar for the banks, so they don’t have to deploy point-of-sale (POS) technology individually.

“Up until this point, banks would have had to individually invest in technology to enable mobile payments and enable them securely,” Weve CEO David Sear explained to me. “Now what’s happening is MasterCard is building the capability for banks to do that at very low cost.”

Sear said the deal would lead to widespread rollout of mobile payments capabilities in British shops during 2015 – around 300,000 points of sale in the country can already accept contactless card payments, so this will largely be a matter of making those machines see suitably-equipped phones as cards.

The phones will use NFC-enabled SIM cards, so they won’t need to have NFC built into the handset as such. However, Apple’s longstanding NFC allergy will mean iPhone users won’t get to join the party.