RIM will soon begin their foray into the NFC league starting from Iberia and have announced their partnership with Telefonica of Madrid, Spain.
Blackberry and Telefonica will be testing the mobile wallet and the ID card system in Spain. The Telefonica wallet trial with Blackberry would involve 350 Telefonica employees and select group of testers in Madrid, with the users being able to use the service for making payments, security pass as well as checking bank statements on their Blackberry handsets.
Matthew Key of Telefonica cited that trust with the customers to handle their personal and financial information is very important and which is one of the primary reasons why Telefonica decided to partner with Blackberry.
Although Key did not specify as to when exactly would the service be launched by Telefonica, but stated that we can expect the payment services to start early next year in some of the important markets including Spain.
Although Nokia have already adopted the NFC system, analysts say that the technology will be widely accepted instantly if Apple decides to use NFC in their next version of the iPhone. Google wallet services will be made available in most of the Android handsets in 2012 and it will be a challenge to convince the customers to chuck their credit cards in favor of the NFC technology.
