Gemalto teams up with Chunghwa Telecom

Gemalto 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. The Taiwanese are the most frequent users of smartphones in the Asia Pacific region1 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 outlets2 where the Mifare transit scheme is accepted.