A1, Austria’s largest mobile operator and part of the Telekom Austria Group, is launching
A1, formerly known as mobilkom Austria, is perhaps the first telco worldwide to own its own bank, which it started in 2002. It’s also an NFC pioneer, launching NFC tag-based transit ticketing in 2007, following a pilot. So it’s not so surprising the telco would shun the major card schemes, Visa and MasterCard, in favor of its own payment brand. But among the many challenges facing A1 will be recruiting enough physical merchants to join the scheme and convincing them to deploy point-of-sale terminals supporting the contactless paybox application. Paybox NFC will also be limited to Austria and maybe only to A1, though the telco says it’s in talks with other Austrian operators. And, at least at launch, the telco is not planning to offer any other applications to encourage consumers to use the NFC service, such as loyalty or coupons. All of this means A1 faces an uphill climb in getting its payment scheme established at the physical point of sale.
* Trusted Service Manager: Defined loosely to include companies or other organizations securely distributing, provisioning and managing applications, generally over the air, on secure elements in NFC mobile phones; or licensing their platforms for this purpose.
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Last update: April 2012