Mobile payments in Japan set to expand through MasterCard DoCoMo partnership

Mobile Payments Industry News

Mobile Payments Industry News

The credit card giant and the largest Japanese wireless operator have announced their new deal.

The largest wireless operator in Japan, NTT DoCoMo, has just announced its new partnership with MasterCard, which will soon be broadening the world of mobile payments with the new iD system that will be able to combine with the PayPass solution that is already widely in place around the world..

The service is expected to be launched during the first half of 2013’s fiscal year, which begins in April.

The new mobile payments service will be available as an opt-in feature for DoCoMo customers, and will require those individuals to carry mobile phones with compatible technology. The carrier has previously been heavily reliant on FeliCa technology for the iD service, but this will become available to more device owners, as the system from MasterCard runs on a Type AB Near Field Communication (NFC) standard, instead.

These combined technologies will open mobile payments opportunities for a larger number of consumers.

According to the DoCoMo executive vice president and managing director of the credit card business division, Masaki Yoshikawa, “DOCOMO launched the iD-branded mobile credit payments in Japan in 2005. With 17m users, we have the most number of subscribers using the Osaifu-Keitai (mobile phones with wallet functions). This collaboration with MasterCard will enable our iD users to make payments at PayPass merchants worldwide and increase the usage of mobile payment solutions.”

Similarly, the group head for emerging payments in Asia/Pacific for MasterCard Worldwide, Philip Yen, said that the credit card giant is “quite excited” about the new partnership in Japan, and that they have recognized the wireless provider as a leader in the industry for some time. They take great pride in the fact that they were chosen for this new mobile payments project.

This is only the most recent of many mobile payments partnerships that MasterCard has been starting worldwide. It has been placing a great deal of focus on the ability to allow consumers to complete transactions using their smartphones. There are already more than 70 smartphone models being manufactured around the world that support the technology required to use PayPass.

Yen went on to express that it is the believe of MasterCard that mobile payments is currently in a trend that can be described as an “upward spiral”.

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