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Four Swedish mobile operators announced they have formed a mobile-payments joint venture, the latest telcos to form a company to help them roll out NFC and other services.

The telcos, TeliaSonera, Telenor, Tele2 and 3, are apparently planning a common mobile-payments platform, which their respective subscribers could use for “all types of mobile payments,” with the goal of increasing transactions. Plans call for offering services as early as the summer of 2012.

Swedish subscribers now use their phones for paying for some transport and parking, according to a short announcement by the four telcos. Plans likely call for other types of payments, including at the retail point of sale. It’s unclear yet, however, whether the operators plan to offer their own payment services or only those of other service providers, such as banks. And there are few contactless terminals at the merchant locations in Sweden.

The telcos follow their counterparts in a growing number of countries forming joint ventures for mobile payment or planning to do so. They include the United States, with the Isis NFC joint venture announced a year ago by Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, and telcos in Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, Hungary, the Netherlands and possibly Taiwan.

The German telcos plan to introduce their own payment scheme, mpass, at the physical point of sale, along with hosting other payment applications on NFC phones. The Travik joint venture in the Netherlands includes the country’s three major banks.

The telcos in most of the countries say they are not interested in introducing their own payment services but to agree on common specifications for payment applications running on NFC phones and how those applications will be managed over the network.

In almost all cases so far, the telcos say they plan to require applications be stored on SIM cards their members issue. And in some countries, they plan to hire their own TSM to serve all the members. They could also agree on common branding and marketing efforts for their mobile wallets.

All of this could draw increasing scrutiny of regulators, especially if the telcos try to close off their platforms and discourage competing mobile wallet players, such as Google, from launching services.