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Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission has approved a joint venture among Taiwan’s five mobile operators and its major contactless payments service provider, EasyCard Corp., to build an NFC payments platform, but with conditions.

Telefónica (O2) Germany has announced it will launch its NFC-enabled O2 Wallet in mid-February, beginning as a “friendly user test” on two Android smartphones that will enable users to tap to make purchases with the telco’s own payments service, mpass.

Research In Motion continues to promote its own trusted service management service–the only handset maker to offer one–announcing Wednesday approval by Visa of the service to manage secure elements on NFC phones.

Transactions with Visa payWave cards in Taiwan grew by 19% during the third quarter with spending up by 23%, according to Visa’s country office in Taiwan.

The MCX consortium, the group of major U.S. merchants planning to roll out their own mobile wallet, will primarily use bar codes and cloud-based technologies to start off with, not NFC.

Taiwan-based MediaTek, a major supplier of processor chips for smartphones, has announced its first NFC chip, which it says could support three secure elements at one time.

While a sizable percentage of UK consumers say they are ready to use their smartphones as mobile wallets to make payments at the physical point of sale–especially if they receive incentives and security assurances–mobile wallets are unlikely to take off in 2013, according to UK-based market research firm ICM Research.

Automakers BMW and Hyundai both recently announced plans to incorporate NFC functionality into their vehicles.

Retail locations accepting MasterCard PayPass contactless payment doubled in Europe in 2012, according to MasterCard Worldwide, a development that helps clear a path for more rollouts of NFC payment.

Facing growing pressure from a dissident shareholders group, Oded Bashan has submitted his resignation as chairman of Israel-based contactless and NFC vendor On Track Innovations, a company he co-founded 22 years ago.

ARM, Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient today launched their joint venture, Trustonic, seeking to encourage broad deployment of technology that puts smart card-like security right on the main application processor of smartphones and other devices.