The new Telefónica Digital business unit has reached an agreement with security technology company Giesecke & Devrient to establish a single European-wide platform for Near Field Communication services.

It means that G&D will take care of the ‘Trusted Service Manager’ technology and will also be one of the suppliers of NFC-enabled SIM cards.

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 and BlackBerry Curve 9360 smartphones have been announced as the first SIM-based NFC smartphones to be certified by MasterCard Worldwide as PayPass-approved devices.

It means that any bank issuing MasterCard PayPass credit or debit cards will be able to deploy MasterCard PayPass-enabled accounts to the SIM card of these smartphones.

Mark Bridge writes:

Watch almost any American TV show from the 1960s - I'd recommend a good police procedural - and at some point after a few episodes there'll be a scene in a restaurant. One of the main characters will be dining and their meal will be interrupted by a waiter bringing a telephone to the table. The phone will probably have an implausibly long cable, although there may be a telephone socket nearby.

First there were SIMs the size of credit cards. Then there were the fingernail-sized cards we've become familiar with. More recently we've seen a microSIM in the Apple iPhone 4. And now Apple wants to shrink SIM cards even more.

Apple has contacted the European Telecommunications Standards Institute to propose an ultra-small SIM card for future devices.

Digital security company Gemalto has announced that its SIM card embedded with a Near Field Communication application has been certified by MasterCard. It's the world’s first SIM-embedded app that complies with MasterCard's mobile NFC spec.

Gemalto's now preparing to launch the service in the UK with a global financial institution and a mobile operator.