O2 Names Financial Services Partners

O2 today confirmed some of the leading financial services players it will work with to launch its mobile wallet service during the second half of 2011. Wave Crest, FIS’, Intelligent Environments and Visa Europe have all been appointed to deliver the payments and processing systems upon which O2’s next phase of financial services products will be based.

O2 has committed to launching a mobile wallet service during the second half of 2011 which will start the process of taking the contents of the physical wallet and putting them on a mobile phone. Capabilities planned for the wallet include m-commerce, airtime top ups, contactless / NFC payments and peer-to-peer payments. Although the service will launch solely under the O2 Money brand, O2 will be working with a number of leading technical and financial services specialists to ensure the best possible customer experience.

In the coming months O2 will also re-launch its successful prepaid Visa card product with contactless capabilities. The new O2 Money prepaid cards will also operate on the platform and systems provided by these new partners. Existing O2 Money customers will be given the opportunity to be migrated to the new platform and be issued the new contactless prepaid cards.

Global epayments provider Wave Crest will provide and operate the core banking platform upon which the new prepaid card and mobile wallet services will run. Wave Crest’s eMoney platform is a flexible and highly integrated service, ideally suited for prepaid and stored value financial services products. Wave Crest will also manage the security and online customer experience.

FIS, the world’s largest provider of banking and payments technology, will provide transaction processing and UK-based customer service for both the prepaid cards and mobile wallet.

Intelligent Environments has been appointed to develop the wallet application which will be compatible with a wide range of mobile devices. Intelligent Environments is a digital banking provider and part of the Parseq Group.

Finally, Visa Europe will be the payment network for the wallet and new prepaid products building on the successful relationship between the two companies which began with the launch of O2 Money in 2009.

‘These partnerships take us another step closer to the launch of commercial mobile wallet services,’ said James Le Brocq, Managing Director, Financial Services at O2. ‘We are working with the best partners in their respective fields to bring a high quality service to market under the O2 Money banner. We look forward to unveiling additional partners in the coming months.’

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