Telenor is Norway's leading mobile operator with three million subscribers in the country and some 180 million worldwide. DNB and SpareBank 1 are respectively the first and second largest financial services providers in the country. Four more banks are already planning to join the Valyou community, enabling even more users to make secure payments at fast food restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations with a simple touch of their smartphone on an NFC-ready terminal.

Gemalto's hub platform for Valyou is a turnkey business service hosted in Gemalto's certified secure data centers, ensuring banking-grade security for NFC payments. Significantly, it offers banks, mobile and transport operators and all digital service providers a single connection in order to deploy their mobile services securely and seamlessly. Gemalto's solution also provides Valyou with the broadest reach of users and most future-proof technology across mobile platforms.

"We are eager to promote NFC take up in Norway and provide all consumers with multiple innovative services, starting with payment and moving on to ID, access control, ticketing, loyalty and special offers," said Tor Jacobsen, CEO for Valyou. "With this in mind, we have chosen Gemalto's trusted service platform, which allows the on-boarding of additional stakeholders over time and will boost consumer adoption and stickiness."

"Gemalto is committed to supporting Valyou in their role of NFC accelerator as they look to expand the mobile contactless eco-system across the entire Nordic region," said Philippe Cambriel, President for Europe, Mediterranean and CIS at Gemalto. "Consumers are very keen to adopt NFC services, as shown by the positive feedback generated by an early pilot undertaken by Telenor and DNB, where 97% of the participants said that they wanted to use this type of service when it is launched."