Gemalto, on Wednesday announced that it has teamed up with Chunghwa Telecom, the largest operator in Taiwan with 10 million subscribers, to secure their mobile NFC services. This commercial launch, supported by MasterCard and four leading Taiwanese banks, uses Gemalto's UpTeq Multi-tenant NFC SIM and embedded software to host mobile payment and Mifare transit purse on a single card.

This enables Chunghwa Telecom's subscribers to pay for a variety of goods and services, including rides on Taipei's crowded metro trains and buses, with a simple tap of their NFC phones on a contactless reader. Gemalto's NFC SIM solution provides banking-grade security for mobile contactless transactions.

"Taiwan has a strong contactless infrastructure in place, with a long record of NFC trials. With Gemalto's robust SIMs that comply with different generations of NFC readers, we are enabled to offer hassle-free mobile contactless services to a wide base of customers," said Kuo-Feng Lin, Mobile Business Group President of Chunghwa Telecom.

"In addition to our strong track record of more than 50 NFC deployments worldwide, we have been ranked first in Transport and Ticketing by ABI Research Assessment 2014. This allows us to deliver a future-proof NFC platform, which will enable Chunghwa Telecom to add new NFC services such as access control, loyalty coupons, and smart posters, through the progressive addition of new partners over time," said Suzanne Tong-Li, President for Greater China and Korea at Gemalto.

The Taiwanese are the most frequent users of smartphones in the Asia Pacific region and this deployment will pave the way for more service providers to come onboard and deploy mobile contactless services in the country. Chunghwa Telecom customers will be able to download multiple credit cards on their phones, and then use any of them for mobile NFC payments in over 24,000 contactless terminals in major stores, taxis, restaurants, malls, and movie theaters. They will also be able to make contactless payments for their transport and small-value purchases at thousands of other outlets where the Mifare transit scheme is accepted.