Contactless payment services from O2 and Orange

O2 has announced the first of the partners it will work with to roll out its ‘Mobile Wallet’ service in the second half of the year. Capabilities planned for the wallet include m-commerce, airtime top ups, contactless NFC payments and peer to peer payments.
The service will be available to all O2 customers and will eventually be pre-installed on mobile devices on sale from the operator. O2 announced partnerships with global e-payments company Wave Crest, global banking and payment technology provider FIS, digital banking solutions provider Intelligent Environments and Visa Europe to roll out the service.

Orange and Barclaycard have been working in partnership for some time on contactless payments, however they are now officially launching this service across specialist stores such as Little Chef, Wembley Arena, and Subway. Customers can make purchases of up to £15 in over 50,000 stores.
The service will be available to Orange customers who use a ‘Quick Tap’ enabled handset. To support the launch, Barclaycard is providing Orange customers with £10 cash added to their account upon activation, and 10% cash back on all Quick Tap purchases made in the first three months.

Orange and T-Mobile share 2G networks

Orange and T-Mobile are giving their customers the opportunity to sign up to use the 2G signal from either networks. This means that if your handset isn’t picking up a signal from your home network, you will be able to receive the signal from the other network if available. Interested customers need to visit www.orange.co.uk/share and enter their handset details.

An update will be sent to the handset which will change the settings to allow it to pick up both networks. As well as the update message Orange customers will be asked to turn their phone off/on in order to activate the network share (T-Mobile customers will not need to do anything).

Customers can opt-out of the network share at any time and calls made over both networks will be at the customer’s existing rate.