Asia's mobile commerce marketplace is expanding, with Warid Telecom formally launching mobile banking services in Pakistan while Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom gets the green light for NFC payment services.
Warid Telecom has launched a marketing campaign for its Mobile Paisa branchless banking service in Pakistan, following a soft-launch of the offering earlier this year.
The operator is offering the service in collaboration with Bank Alfalah and Monet Limited, which is using Visa's technology.
The Mobile Paisa service covers money transfer, bill payments and customer mobile wallets. The companies said they plan to introduce more services for customers, corporates and government-to-person payments shortly.
The service now has over 10,000 agents for branchless banking, Warid Telecom said, and the company plans to add another 30,000 agents across 1,000 towns in the very near future.
Chunghwa Telecom has separately received security certification from Visa to offer virtual credit cards that use NFC technology on smartphones, Focus Taiwansaid.
The operator plans to partner with local companies including banks to launch NFC services, and will use its Trusted Service Manager system to issue the virtual cards.
Chunghwa started trialing NFC mobile payments in 2012. The operator is one of four founding telco members of the Asia NFC Alliance, which officially formed in February.