Spanish bank la Caixa has brought on board three of the country's biggest telcos - Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange - for the January launch of its mobile NFC payments service.
The service will get a soft launch next month and be fully up and running by February, open to all la Caixa customers who have phones through Telefónica, Vodafone and Orange, which between them account for 80% of the Spanish market.
Customers can put all their la Caixa cards on their handsets, with the data stored, encrypted, on the NFC SIMs. A deal with Visa Europe means that users can then make payments of up to EUR20 at any of the 300,000 contactless POS terminals throughout Spain.
The bank is predicting that the service will be popular with Spaniards, anticipating 100,000 users by the end of next year.