25/10/11
By Karen Moss
In Singapore you may be able to pay for your purchases by tapping your mobile phone at more than 20,000 retail points and taxis by mid-2012.
This NFC-enabled service is made possible through a consortium which was set up after the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore made a Call-for-Collaboration with industry players to set up a nationwide NFC infrastructure in 2010.
IDA decided to award the Call-for-Collaboration to a consortium comprising seven companies.
The companies include the three mobile operators - M1, SingTel and StarHub - and payment service providers Citibank, DBS and EZ-Link as well as Gemalto, a digital security company which serves as a neutral third party linking up the payment service providers to the telcos.
IDA and the seven companies will invest S$40 million on the NFC infrastructure to reach out to all mobile subscribers in Singapore.
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