The jointly-owned venture, called Wireless Payment Services, is aiming to establish a commercial m-payments service in Canada within the next year that will be used by subscribers of all the participating mobile phone networks.

Jeff Chorlton, president of Wireless Payment Services, says the company's mandate is to develop standardised, secure and easy-to-use mobile payment capabilities that work with existing debit and credit systems offered by Canada's financial institutions and across all national Canadian wireless carriers".

The m-pay system will be based on text and multimedia messaging and Wi-Fi Hotspot services developed by the three telecoms firms.

The initial phase of the project will allow pre-paid mobile users to purchase top-ups with their debit or credit cards. Phase two will look at additional opportunities for enabling mobile users to make purchases using their hand sets.