Vodafone customers will soon be able to add bank cards to their Vodafone Wallet and use smartphones to pay for goods and services at contactless terminals, the company announced today. Following new agreements with Visa and Carta Worldwide, bank card payments via Vodafone Wallet will be enabled in European markets from the second quarter of 2015 onward, the company said.

This service, which requires a Vodafone NFC SIM, will be supported on a wide range of Android smartphones.  To use the service, customers will:

• input their bank cards to the Vodafone Wallet app, where an alias of each card is stored securely in the Vodafone NFC SIM;
• confirm ownership of the card using Verified by Visa authentication;
• pay by tapping their phones against a contactless point-of-sale terminal; and
• check their mobile payment transaction history using their phones, wherever they are.

Payments are automatically debited from the selected bank cards, which are protected with a user-defined 4-digit PIN for higher value payments.

"The digital wallet just took another step forward," Mark Ritzmann, head of m-commerce at Vodafone Group, said in the announcement. "With a few clicks, customers will be able to add payment cards to their Vodafone Wallet and use Android smartphones to pay at contactless terminals. Thanks to our agreements with Visa and Carta Worldwide, using bank cards stored on Vodafone Wallet is fast, secure and simple.

Vodafone Wallet is currently available in Germany, Spain, the U.K., Italy and the Netherlands. Customers can already add loyalty cards into the Vodafone Wallet, as well as pay with the Vodafone SmartPass that was launched in partnership with Visa in 2013, the company said. Carta Worldwide has partnered with Vodafone to provide the payment card-enabling technology.