French to pay for goods via mobile

Paris: France Telecom will enable its customers to pay for their rides on the Paris metro or for retail purchases with their mobile phones as it seeks to win ground in services from Apple and Google.

France’s largest phone company said in an emailed statement yesterday that it will begin work on a new generation of SIM cards for so-called contactless payments.

The company will work with handset manufacturers, and plans to get secured SIM cards in customers’ phones from the second half of next year.

Phones with such technology, common in Japan, are used to make payments with a wave in front of a reader.

Chief executive Stephane Richard, like executives at other phone companies, is searching for new revenue sources to avoid ceding the services market to Apple and Google, whose offerings dominate many users’ mobile experiences.