MasterCard is partnering with leading German telcos Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica Deutschland and Vodafone to develop a mass market mobile payments network covering 80% of handset-owners in the country.
Instead of connecting to individual mobile operators, issuing banks who sign up to the platform will connect to MasterCard's wholly-owned payments processor and Trusted Services Manager Trevica. In this way, banks can gain access to a number of mobile operators with a single integration effort.
Stefano Parisse, group director consumer services at Vodafone says: "We want to enable banks to reach more of their customers with secure NFC. By reducing the cost for banks to integrate and by reducing their time to market, we are confident that we have a model for Germany that will work around Europe."
Pawel Rychlinski, division president Germany and Switzerland at MasterCard, bills the partnership as a 'game-changer' in Germany that will be extended to more European countries during 2014.
"By bringing together the best in banking and mobile, we make mobile payments ubiquitous across all networks, just like messaging today," he says.
The plans are an improvement on the usual proprietary telco offerings to the banking industry, but may be too little and too late given the more attractive possibilities opened up to banks by the recent development of Host Card Emulation and cloud-based payments techniques.