Telekom Austria is to extend its established paybox NFC scheme for parking and transit payments to the merchant point-of-sale.
Paybox, which is operated by the telco's own mobile subsidiary A1 and fully-licensed Paybox Bank, will initially make the service available to 5000 customers for shopping in selected McDonald's restaurants and stores of supermarket chain Merkur.
The scheme, which will utilise NFC stickers or the SIM on selected mobile phones, will enable users to make contactless payments to a value of EUR25 without the need of a PIN.
After a testing phase, A1 Telekom Austria says it will roll out the programme to other retail partners.
It will compete directly with Raiffeisen Bank, which is working with Visa and Cardis to launch its own iPhone-based mobile wallet service by the end of this quarter.