O2 to launch mobile wallet this year

Operator will start rolling out contactless mobile payment solutions in the second half of the year

O2 has confirmed that it will launch a mobile wallet solution in the second half of 2011.

The company has defined four key services that will be offered: being able to buy products and services online via m-commerce payments, mobile money transfers from person to person, mobile pay-as-you-go top-up services and contactless payments in retail stores.

A spokesperson told Computing that these four services will probably not launch at the same time, but the first will be introduced in the second half of the year and the rest will follow.

"There are big opportunities for retailers around contactless," the O2 spokesperson explained.

"There are around 40,000 contactless terminals in the UK, in places such as Eat and McDonald's, and that's one of the things that has stymied near field communications (NFC) in the past.

"Unless you get a large enough amount of NFC readers out there, consumers won't use the service. But we will see that number rising to around 60,000 by the end of the year and the Olympics next year will provide impetus to create more readers."

O2 carried out a mobile payment trial with Transport for London (TfL) in 2007 and the company revealed that plans to introduce mobile payment for London's transport services are under way.

"TfL is currently changing the Oyster standard from a proprietary standard to Euro-pay Mastercard Visa (EMV) - the open NFC strandard. And in that case you'll be able to use your NFC credit card or mobile phone as an Oyster Card.

London buses will move to this standard next year and the rest of the transport services will do so over the course of 2012," said the spokesperson.

"Once that happens, transport and ticketing will become a big part of our mobile payments offering," he concluded.