Zantel, a subsidiary of leading UAE telecom operator Etisalat, has launched Africa’s first commercial near field communications (NFC) payment service in Tanzania.

The new offering dubbed ‘Touch and Go’ is a revolutionary enhancement to Zantel’s existing and rapidly expanding mobile financial service (zPesa), said a company statement.

Etisalat and its partners Oberthur Technologies and MasterCard have redefined innovation in the NFC arena showing benefit for all types of consumers from tech savvy entrepreneurs and university students, corporate customers and even the un-banked.

NFC is a relatively new technology that is now being introduced in markets around the world, said a top official.

“Touch and Go offers a convenient, secure, easy to use and versatile service that anyone can access,” explained Essa Al Haddad, Etisalat group chief marketing officer.

“The secret for its success is the simplicity of the process. A customer can use “Touch and Go” with merchants to purchase goods, services, tickets or even mobile credit top-ups without needing to type any numbers or complicated commands,' said Haddad.

'The customer just needs to bring device close to the merchant’s point of sale terminal and validate the transaction with a password,' he added.

According to him, Zantel’s customers who are using its zPesa service to perform person-to-person money transfer, merchant/utility payments or banking services from their mobile phones can now swiftly execute secure transactions using the new service.

“Touch and Go is new, innovative and ideally suited to customers that want to use the technology to complement the existing experience and also to people who will use the service as the sole means of generating an income for their families,” Haddad said.

The long established partnership is a precursor to the Etisalat Group’s progressive plans to rollout mobile financial services and NFC technology across its 18 markets in the Middle East, African and Asia.

“The service launch represents another landmark for Oberthur in emerging markets with NFC SIM and mobile adaptor enablers combining to provide a state of the art secure technical platform, bringing a homogeneous end-user experience to Etisalat customers”, said Cedric Collomb, director of Mobile Product Line, Oberthur Technologies.-TradeArabia News Service