Venyon

10th February 2009, Helsinki, Finland

Venyon and Kasikornbank to cooperate on contactless mobile payments in Thailand

Venyon and Kasikornbank, a leading bank in Thailand announced today that they are cooperating to evaluate contactless mobile payments in Thailand for a potential service launch in future. As a first step, Kasikornbank recently announced its first Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile payment trial in Bangkok, Thailand.

The trial will make it possible for Kasikornbank customers to walk into a store that accepts contactless payments and to purchase goods simply by waving a NFC mobile phone over the contactless reader at the point of sale. Purchases will be charged directly to the customer’s Kasikornbank credit card account.

Participants in the Kasikornbank mobile payment trial will use their NFC-enabled Nokia 6212 mobile devices to make purchases at more than 1,000 existing merchant locations in Thailand. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless connectivity standard that enables intuitive, simple and safe communication between NFC compatible devices. Products with built-in NFC capability can simplify the way consumer devices interact with one another, helping people to receive and share information and make fast and secure payments.

Venyon’s role in the first stage of the Kasikornbank mobile payment trial is a services partner and in future stages a Trusted Service Manager (TSM). TSM provides neutral and trusted services to service providers, such as banks, retailers and transit operators, and to mobile network operators to enable third party NFC applications to be provisioned over the air (OTA) to the NFC-enabled phones and SIM cards. Furthermore Venyon can enable convenient OTA life-cycle management services after provisioning of these applications as well as OTA management of application content, such as top-up of a stored value application.

Media enquiries:

Venyon:                                               Kasikornbank:
Jukka Yliuntinen                                    Mr. Rungsee Buranaprapapong
Chief Marketing Officer                          Head of Public Relations
Tel: +358 40 562 04 28                         Tel: +662 470 2653-8
Email: jukka.yliuntinen@venyon.com      Email: rungsee.b@kasikornbank.com

About Venyon

Venyon is driving seamless communication in NFC ecosystems by developing and operating a secure and versatile service platform to be used for the over the air (OTA) provisioning of the consumer applications, such as credit cards and transport tickets, to consumers’ NFC enabled mobile devices. Acting as a Trusted Service Manager (TSM) Venyon offers white-label OTA services for mobile operators, banks, transport companies, retailers and other service providers, who are offering different applications for consumers’ NFC devices. Venyon is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland and has offices also in Munich, Germany, Dallas, USA and Singapore. For more information,
please visit www.venyon.com.

About KASIKORNBANK

Kasikornbank (KBank), Thailand’s first bank to offer credit card services, has for over 60 years of operation been regarded as Thailand's premier banking institution, and a renowned forward thinking bank. The founding of KASIKORNBANKGROUP in 2005 raised the Bank to a comprehensive financial service provider with one singular brand of quality service- K Excellence. With recognition from various leading institutions, KBank is regarded as the leader in many areas of service including SME banking, Trade Finance, and mobile phone banking. The ATM SIM is the latest innovation KBank introduced to the country enabling customers that have a KBank account linked to a DTAC mobile phone to conduct financial transactions through their mobile phone, as if they had an ATM in their pocket! For more information, visit www.kasikornbank.com.


Press release in pdf format