T-Mobile Poland confirmed it had signed up 5,500 “users” for its NFC-enabled wallet as of early January, a little more than two months after launching the service.
The telco, which launched NFC services in late October, disclosed the number of users in announcing that two more banks, Getin Bank and a sister financial institution, Noble Bank, had joined its MyWallet service.
As of late January 2013, that brought to four the number of banks issuing MasterCard PayPass payment applications for T-Mobile Poland SIM cards. The other two banks are Raifeissen Polbank, formerly known as Polbank EFG; and mBank, which is owned by BRE Bank; a T-Mobile Poland spokesman told NFC Times.
The 5,500 is believed to be the number of NFC SIM cards the telco has issued, not the number of subscribers who use the mobile-payment services. The latter figure is believed to be much lower. But the spokesman told NFC Times that the 5,500 “user” signups for the telco’s MyWallet service were better than expected after a little more than two months.
T-Mobile Poland, also known as PTC locally, has a total of 15.5 million subscribers. The service is only available to postpaid subscribers.
The spokesman said the telco hasn’t released actual usage numbers for the NFC applications. Subscribers with an NFC SIM and any of eight NFC handsets certified by MasterCard that the telco has put on sale can tap to pay anywhere PayPass is accepted.
That includes about 100,000 point-of-sale terminals in Poland, which represents roughly one-third of all POS terminals in the country–one of the highest penetrations rates of contactless terminals anywhere.
