The agreement is designed to extend over the next five years.
Gemalto, a digital security company, will be signing a global deal to last five years with Vodafone Group PLC, the mobile giant, in order to provide the technology for mobile commerce payment services that are slated to roll out in 2013.
Gemalto is an Amsterdam based company that should be announcing the deal this week.
As of yet, no financial details regarding this mobile commerce deal have been released. As the popularity of smartphones and other wireless devices continue to rise, technology firms, credit card companies, and mobile operators are making grabs for partnerships with technology providers as they launch their mobile payments services. These are designed to allow consumers to shop using their smartphones in place of credit and debit cards.
As of yet, mcommerce payments and mobile wallets have proven to be tricky.
Without any standards throughout the industry and as a growing number of companies begin offering their own unique forms of what mobile payments should be, the entire industry remains a thin one. It may include a large number of players, but consumers have yet to latch on to the idea, finding it quite chaotic and tricky, with continuing doubts over security.
Just this last week, the mobile wallet, ISIS, was launched in two cities by the largest wireless operators in the United States: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile. Those same cities have already been exposed to Google Wallet over the last few months. Neither has generated much use from consumers, despite the high concentration of smartphones in those areas.
In the U.K., mcommerce will be experiencing a similar launch, next year, when Weve, the newly renamed mobile wallet joint venture among Telefonica SA’s U.K. unit O2, EE, and Vodafone. That rollout will begin with a smartphone marketing service that will then move on to the wallet.
Vodafone and Visa have had a mobile payments agreement since February, when they started to allow consumers to use their smartphones to pay for goods and services. The companies are hoping that British consumers will grab on to this form of mobile commerce with much more momentum than those in the U.S.
