The Mobey Forum, a bank-backed initiative to develop a mechanism for mobile payments, has signed up the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) as its first North American member bank. The Forum has also added Development Bank of Singapore Limited (DBS), Credit Suisse and the Royal Bank of Scotland to its board of directors.
The Forum advocates the use of dual chip technology in mobile handsets, creating an additional slot next to the SIM card for bank payment cards. The first commercial trial of the technology was recently initiated in Sweden by Nordea, Nokia and Visa.
The Forum currently has the support of 30 banks and mobile handset manufacturers. Bo Harald, a Nordea executive and Mobey Forum chairman, says that 60 banking industry delegates attended a recent one-day workshop in Munich.
Gerrard Schmid, managing director, CIBC World Markets, comments: "We have looked at several different proposals, but the Mobey Forum's PPA (preferred payment architecture) is the only one that has been designed with an open architecture and which utilises as much of today's infrastructure for transactions."