Giesecke & Devrient, the Munich-based financial services and security company, is looking to stick it to mobile phone-makers — so to speak.

G&D is introducing the first payment sticker to meet the German banking industry's specification. The new sticker, affixed to a cell phone or smartphone, allows the device to make contactless payments using NFC technology even if the phone itself doesn't have NFC capability. With this solution, G&D is able to fill a void in NFC-enabled devices, and let anyone with a mobile device transact contactless payments.

The company said that although there are currently 50 or so NFC-enabled smartphones on the market, few users actually own the devices. G&D hopes its new contactless payment stickers will serve as a bridge technology on the road to mobile payment by cell phone.

The stickers are approximately 2 inches by 1 inch and are certified for use with MasterCard's contactless PayPass technology. This makes them usable at more than 350,000 PayPass contactless terminals in 37 countries.

The new mobile stickers were developed especially for the German market, the company said, and run on the SECCOS Secure Chip Card Operating System, the German banking industry system for smartcards. Issuing banks can configure the stickers as prepaid, debit, or credit cards.

German banks Sparda-Bank Hamburg and Donner & Reuschel will be the first financial institutions to issue the new stickers. Deutsche Genossenschafts-Verlag, a system integrator and partner of the cooperative banks, will supply the new technology as part of a trial program.

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