Network for Electronic Transfers Singapore (NETS), Singapore’s
largest electronic payments provider, and mobile phone service
provider Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) have joined forces
in a groundbreaking pilot project that, NETS said, forms part of
its strategy to make mobile payments “pervasive across the
economy”.

The project, the first of its kind in Asia, gets under way in
September and will see NETS and SingTel staff begin trials using
mobile phones equipped with stored value and over-the-air (OTA)
funds transfer and near field communication (NFC) contactless
payment capabilities. VivoTech, a US-based vendor, is supplying the
NFC technology and OTA applications used in the project.

Following the initial in-house trial phase of the service, dubbed
mNETS, a trial service will be available to Singapore customers of
SingTel with accounts at DBS Bank, Oversea-Chinese Banking
Corporation and United Overseas Bank in the fourth quarter of this
year. SingTel’s Singapore mobile subscriber base stood at 1.95
million at the end of June 2007.

During the public trial customers will download mNETS then initiate
the payment application, which will enable up to S$500 ($327) to be
stored in an electronic wallet. Users will be able to load up to
S$40 per day using the mobile phone’s OTA funds transfer capability
and make contactless payments at a growing number of merchants
served by NETS equipped with contactless terminals.

According to a spokesperson for NETS, the payment processor already
has 1,200 contactless terminals in use. Participants in the
NETS/SingTel trial will have access to 400 contactless terminals at
148 outlets of five merchants. NETS serves a total of 12,500
merchants in 30,000 locations in Singapore.

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“NFC will be the next big thing for electronic payments,” said
NETS’s CEO, Poh Mui Hoon. “We anticipate that with the alliance
with SingTel, we will be looking at three out of ten mobile phones
being NFC-compatible in 2012.”

Another mNETS application to be assessed during the pilot programme
is mNETS Coupons, an electronic coupon containing special offers or
discounts on products from more than 400 merchants. The coupons
will be downloaded from posters or billboards using the mobile
phone’s NFC capability. “Our vision is to enable as many
applications as possible on the mobile wallet,” said Quek Peck
Leng, CEO of SingTel Mobile.