Partnership between MasterCard and Deutsche Telekom

• MasterCard and Deutsche Telekom have partnered on a large-scale mobile contactless payment project, likely to impact 93 million EU DT customers. The mobile carrier relies on its licensed EMI subsidiary ClickandBuy to propose these new MasterCard affiliated products.

• The first rollouts planned this year will focus on the Polish and German markets. In the second case, tests are to be conducted based on NFC tags and cards in the first place, before 2013 launch of a mobile wallet to be opened to other banking and issuing partners too.

Source: Press release

• DT (T-Mobile) makes another move in the m-payment market with the help of an international card scheme’s know-how, the latter should benefit from additional customer bases. The partakers in this agreement have opted for a SIM-centric model, as Orange France did, through committing, not long ago, to developing the contactless market with global rollouts (see June 2012 Insight).

• As they have to cope with always more enterprising and popular start-ups on this sector, most operators have opted for partnerships either with banking specialists or card networks, or, precisely with these developers to secure their grounds and grab market shares: Vodafone and Visa, T-Mobile USA and Square, AT&T, Verizon and Intuit, Telia and iZettle, and even Telefónica and MasterCard with Wanda (see February 2012 Insight). These links aim at finding means to remedy sector fragmentation and favour the development of mobile payment.