Trials of mobile phones doubling as a payment tools will soon take place in Taiwan next month, marking a big step for the nation's contactless technology development, industry insiders said yesterday.
With integrated circuit (IC) chips embedded on credit cards, Taiwanese cardholders are already able to make payments at contracted petrol stations, coffee shops, video rental stores, train stations and parking lots by waving cards in front of sensor devices.
Now going one step further, local developers are planting such chips inside handsets, which can be used instead of cash.
As one of the 12 partners in a consortium, BenQ Corp (
The first stage of testing will be conducted by Taipei Smart Card Corp (
"After receiving the phones from BenQ, we'll start testing them as a means of payment for services on bus lines, the MRT and public parking lots in the capital," she said.
The next stage will seek cooperation with mobile service providers to integrate chips with Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards in handsets, so as to enable banking functions such as adding value, checking balance and even use as a debit or credit card.
But when such mobile phones will be mass-produced is still unknown, Wang said.
The marriage of cell phones and IC-chips is part of the government's M-Taiwan (mobile-Taiwan) scheme, which saw a "near field communication" (NFC) consortium established in November last year to pool resources from BenQ, Taipei Smart Card, the Institute for Information Industry (
Handset payment services have already caught on in Japan and South Korea.
In Japan, Sony Corp trials of contactless payment services combines the mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo's i-mode FeliCa smart-card handset and Suica, East Japan Railway's IC card train ticket.
In South Korea, the mobile service provider SK Telecom has launched the Moneta card program with a circulation of 100,000 Visa-enabled mobile handsets. Its next phase is to promote the use of Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) cards in 3G handsets, according to Peter Manners, regional head of Visa International Asia-Pacific.
Addressing participants in the Smart Card Expo at the Taipei International Convention Center yesterday, Manners said Taiwan is second only to Malaysia in the Asia-Pacific in terms of chip-embedded card penetration.
Visa plans to launch the nation's first "free form" chip credit cards with Taichung-based Cota Commercial Bank (三信商銀) today.
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