HEADLINE NEWS
Poland: Orange Operator First to Announce NFC Commercial Launch
Orange Poland is rolling out a prepaid card, called Orange Cash, which is to be issued by BRE Bank. Users would be able to tap to pay at 90,000 MasterCard PayPass terminals in Poland and hundreds of thousands more elsewhere. The bank would use its mBank brand for the Orange service. The bank will offer incentives to encourage customers to sign up for the service: The first 20,000 registered users will receive a 15-zloty (US$4.75) bonus in their prepaid Orange Cash accounts. And those customers who open a new current account at BRE’s mBank and top-up the prepaid Orange Cash card with this new account will receive a refund of 50% of the top-up amount, up to 50 zlotys (US$15.81) per month.
The Polish branch of France Telecom-Orange beat rival T-Mobile in Poland to the announcement of the first NFC commercial service in the country. T-Mobile was expected to follow Orange in announcing service by a few days. For their launches in Poland, both T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom and Orange hope to tap into the growing infrastructure of contactless payment terminals that number about 90,000. MasterCard said today that PayPass transactions account for 10% of total MasterCard transactions in the country, one of the highest contactless-payment rates worldwide. Organizers of the Orange Poland launch have set a goal of 30,000 Orange Cash accounts this year and many more next year. BRE has 2.3 million mobile-banking customers, about 400,000 of which access their accounts frequently, the bank told NFC Times.
* 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.
N/A: Not available or not applicable.
Last update: Jan. 2013
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