The partners say they want to promote near field communication (NFC) technology by making it easier to adopt by businesses in various industries, including financial services.

They are now working together to develop the necessary standards, processes and responsibilities for the telecoms industry as well as a methodology for coordinating with other sectors.

This will mean that, in the future, interested companies will be able to offer their products and services to all mobile phone users via a system that is simple to use and fast to roll out, say the telcos.

The working group is open to all licensed network operators and retailers of mobile phone services as well as other businesses interested in m-payments development.

The founders say they aim to put together an overview of the current market and user requirements over the course of the year before developing the applicable standards.

The objective by the end of 2010 is to be able to provide service models to banks, transportation companies and trading firms to support their electronic services.

The working group will take into account the standards used by international organisations such as ETSI, GSMA, EMVCo and the NFC Forum, in order to ensure cross-border functionality of mobile payment and contactless services. They expect the first, standardised, NFC-capable mobile phones will be launched on the international market by 2010.

In November the GSMA called for full NFC functionality to be built into handsets from mid-2009, in a bid to drive the uptake of contactless payments.