VimpelCom, a leading Russian mobile operator, has announced the next step in its endeavor to combine the mobile phone and the e-wallet. In an attempt to catch up with MTS and MegaFon, the other mobile players who comprise Russia’s “Big Three,” VimpelCom has pooled efforts with Alfa-Bank and MasterCard to test a Near Field Communication (NFC) based payment service.
In this system, a user’s МasterСard data will be stored on his or her SIM card, and special banking software will enable contactless payment provided that cash registers are equipped with Mobile MasterCard PayPass readers. Transactions will be processed by Alfa-Bank, VimpelCom said.
For now, the service is available for a pilot group of select Alfa-Bank customers.
However, this is not the first move that VimpelCom makes in the Russia-wide ‘game of NFC chess’ . In the summer of 2011, the company tested NFC in St. Petersburg’s subway system and on Moscow’s airport express trains. The following year, they undertook a similar effort in Moscow’s subway system.
The Russian NFC market, though still young, has been on the move since 2010. MTS, a competitor of Vimpelcom, then introduced contactless payment in Lukoil petrol stations in Perm, as well as in the Moscow subway. In October 2011, MTS demonstrated a prototype of the ‘Store of the Future’ at the RusNanotech-2011 forum in Moscow.
2011 also saw VimpelCom kick off its Ruru web- and Android-based e-payment system specifically tailored to support wider NFC services, which the firm was planning to launch in the “very near future.”
Earlier this year, the MTS, VimpelCom and Megafon announced plans to jointly promote NFC standards in Russia by establishing an alliance similar to international NFC-focused industry unions such as Oscar in the UK or ISIS in the U.S.
Trilateral talks on setting up a joint venture to push an “integrated platform,” on which to develop NFC-based solutions, began in earnest and still continue since no final decision has been announced thus far.
Smaller players are also jumping into the fray. Just two weeks ago i-Free, a Russian mobile apps, service, and marketing developer, brought Tinkoff Credit Systems Bank and MasterCard on board for what it referred to as “the first full-featured NFC wallet in Russia and the CIS.”
