UK mobile operator Everything Everywhere and US-based credit card firm MasterCard have announced plans to launch a mobile payments venture.
The five-year partnership will initially aim to enable EE’s 27 million customers to make contactless payments…
UK mobile operator Everything Everywhere and US-based credit card firm MasterCard have announced plans to launch a mobile payments venture.
The five-year partnership will initially aim to enable EE’s 27 million customers to make contactless payments to more than 100,000 retailers in the UK. They plan to later expand services to cover mobile banking and online shopping.
Both companies have already been working together for the past three years on near field communications (NFC). Last year, they unveiled Orange QuickTap, the UK’s first commercially available NFC-enabled payments service.
“Working with MasterCard is an important step in making mobile contactless payments more widely available for our 27 million customers,” explained EE chief marketing officer Gerry McQuade.
“By moving our existing co-branded card offers onto mobile devices, we are closer to a world where our customers will be able to use their phone to pay for travel to work, pay for small purchases and take advantage of loyalty rewards from their favourite retail outlets.”
An EE spokeswoman insisted that the announcement does not mean it will be forced to alter plans to forge a similar venture in cooperation with rival mobile operators, which has hit regulatory delays.
Dubbed Project Oscar, this scheme is an alliance between EE, Vodafone and O2, but not Three, the UK’s smallest operator. The European Commission launched an in-depth investigation into the scheme earlier this year, as it attracted heavy criticism from Three, as well as technology giants Google and PayPal.
EE is not the only mobile operator to be working on its own products and services while also co-operating on Project Oscar. Vodafone and O2 have struck similar deals with Visa and Barclaycard, respectively.
But EE’s decision to independently launch a payments venture comes in the fallout of last week’s surprise announcement by local regulator Ofcom, which allowed the operator to launch 4G ahead of its competitors. The go-ahead to use existing spectrum for 4G services drew strong criticism from rival operators. EE has also warned it could consider legal action over the UK’s upcoming 4G auction if its rivals sought to halt its early deployment of next generation services.
