O2 UK announces mobile payment partners

UK carrier O2 has announced the companies it will be partnering with to deploy its mobile wallet service in the second half of 2011. O2, the UK arm of Spanish incumbent Telefónica, said it would be working with Wave Crest, FIS, Intelligent Environments and Visa Europe on the payments and processing systems for the next state of its financial offering, which will enable m-commerce, over the air top-ups, contactless payment and peer to peer transactions.

The UK operator, which had 22.3 million customers at the end of Q1 this year, according to data from Informa’s WCIS Plus, will also be relaunching the prepaid cash card it offers in conjunction with Visa, with the addition of contactless technology.

O2 said that Wave Crest will supply and operate the core banking platform, FIS the transaction processing element, Intelligent Environments will develop the m-wallet app, which O2 said will be compatible with a range of devices and Visa Europe. will provide access to its payment network.

“These partnerships take us another step closer to the launch of commercial mobile wallet services,” said James Le Brocq, managing director of 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.”