New partners, including Visa Europe announced ahead of service’s second half rollout
O2 has announced the first of the partners it will work with to roll out its ‘Mobile Wallet’ service in the second half of the year.
The product, which was first announced in February looks to transfer the entire contents of a physical wallet onto a mobile phone.
Capabilities planned for the wallet include m-commerce, airtime top ups, contactless NFC payments and peer to peer payments.
The service will be available to all O2 customers and will eventually be re-installed on mobile devices on sale from the operator.
The operator announced partnerships with global e-payments company Wave Crest, global banking and and payment technology provider FIS, digital banking solutions provider Intelligent Environments and Visa Europe to roll out the service.
Wave Crest will provide and operate the core banking platform upon which the new prepaid card and mobile wallet services will run, while FIS, will provide transaction processing and UK-based customer service for both the prepaid cards and mobile wallet.
Intelligent Environments has been appointed to develop the wallet application which will be compatible with a wide range of mobile devices and Visa Europe will be the payment network for the wallet and new prepaid products building on the successful relationship between the two companies which began with the launch of O2 Money in 2009.
O2 managing director of financial services James Le Brocq (pictured) said the partnerships took O2 closer to the actual launch of the service.
“We are working with the best partners in their respective fields to bring a high quality service to market under the O2 Money banner. We look forward to unveiling additional partners in the coming months.
Meanwhile O2 has also said it will re-launch its prepaid Visa card product, which will start operating on the same platform as the wallet service.
Its says existing O2 Money customers will be given the opportunity to be migrated to the new platform an will be issued with new prepaid cards should they wish to do this.
