T-Mobile launches NFC in Poland

The second commercial NFC service to go live in Poland this month has the backing of five banks and supports payments via both debit and credit cards.

T-Mobile's MyWallet NFC payments service
MYWALLET: Available in Poland from 29 October

T-Mobile has announced it will begin offering a commercial NFC payments service in Poland on 29 October, in collaboration with MasterCard.

The MyWallet service will allow consumers to store both debit and credit cards on their NFC mobile phones and is launching with the participation of two banks, Polbank and mBank, with Polbank due to offer NFC versions of its full range of MasterCard credit cards and mBank planning to offer NFC to debit card holders. mBank also partnered with Orange Poland for the launch last week of Orange Cash in Poland.

Three further banks — Citi, Bank Millennium and Getin Bank — are in the process of integrating with the T-Mobile service and both transport and event ticketing capabilities are to be added to MyWallet in the future.

“The offer is aimed at both existing and new customers of both banks and T-Mobile,” says the carrier. Suppliers include payments processor Trevica, Cassis/Morpho and Gemalto.

MyWallet is being made available free of charge to all T-Mobile customers. SIMs capable of supporting NFC services are also being provided free of charge while the purchase price of NFC phones which support MyWallet has also been reduced in a bid to increase the number of NFC phone users in Poland.

“Poland has become one of the leaders in the development of contactless payments,” says MasterCard’s Paul Rychliński. “Over 40% of all MasterCard and Maestro cards are cards with PayPass technology. In terms of monthly contactless transactions, Poland is in the top three countries in the world and first in Europe.”

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