Visa Europe, Komerční banka, Telefónica and Samsung are inviting 2000 consumers in the Czech Republic to swap their SIM cards for an NFC-enabled payment card in a commercial test of contactless mobile shopping on the high street.
The new SIM cards are available for free to Samsung Galaxy SIII users at 19 O2 Guru stores across the Czech Republic, with a pre-charged credit of 250CZK from Komercni banka (KB).
The KB Mobile Card (Mobil Karta) can be linked to an existing KB bank account or customers can set up a new account with Komercní banka. The mobile payment application, loaded onto a Samsung Galaxy SIII NFC SIM card, is provided by Visa Europe and will be downloaded to customer's devices for free by specially-trained staff in O2 Guru stores across the country.
Miloslav Kozler, the regional manager of Visa Europe for contactless and mobile projects in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, says: "Today, we are presenting the way people will pay in the future. We believe that by 2020 about a half of all transactions will be done via mobile devices."
The launch builds upon the success of a pilot project carried out in Prague last year - which also included Citibank - and is the precursor to a mass-market roll-out of the technology next year.