China’s No. 2 mobile operator, China Unicom, and the country’s large bank-card network, China UnionPay, will launch a mobile-payment project with NFC phones at the world Expo 2010 in Shanghai–a direct challenge to plans by China Mobile to showcase its RF-SIM technology at the Expo.
The announcement by UnionPay of the project comes just days before the May 1 start of the much-anticipated Expo, where China Mobile has planned the official launch and coming-out party for its proprietary RF-SIMs. The telco’s subscribers can insert the contactless SIMs into their phones and tap to enter Expo venues, ride the Shanghai Metro and pay at some stores and restaurants, including McDonald’s restaurants and Starbucks cafés–using China Mobile’s own payment scheme.
The launch by the giant mobile operator of its own scheme has rankled UnionPay, which has a monopoly on processing domestic bank-card transactions and withdrawals. Besides the new NFC project, UnionPay has responded by stepping up deployment of contactless point-of-sales terminals in China, especially in Shanghai. It pledges to have 15,000 terminals in place in the Expo park and other areas of Shanghai for the world’s fair, which ends in October, and 30,000 deployed in the city by the end of 2010. That includes supermarket chains, fast-food restaurants, convenience stores and movie theaters, said UnionPay. It's part of a goal to roll out terminals to 100,000 contactless merchant locations nationwide by year’s end, UnionPay has announced.
