Orange is set to launch a commercial NFC service in Poland in partnership with local mBank as well as MasterCard. The service, which is called Orange Cash, will be available from 1 November.

The operator says it will be the first in Poland to launch a commercial service “on a large scale” although it did not spell out the scale of its deployment. Orange Poland’s president Maciej Witucki said the operator was targeting “hundreds of thousands” of customers over the next year.

Orange claims it is a leader in NFC, having launched an early pilot of the technology in Poland in March 2011.

The partnership with MasterCard means users with NFC-based handsets will be able to make payments with a pre-paid mBank cards at those point-of-sale locations which are enabled with MasterCard’s PayPass technology.  

The service will be available with nine NFC handsets: the HTC One X; Nokia Lumia 610; Nokia 808 Pure View; Sony Xperia S; Sony Xperia P; Sony Xperia T; Samsung Galaxy S III; BlackBerry Bold 9900; and BlackBerry Bold 9790.

Orange customers can join the service when they sign or extend their contracts with the operator. As well as a NFC handset, they receive an Orange Cash SIM card, as well as an account number to which they will need to transfer funds in order to make contactless payments (it's a pre-paid account).  The bank account is anonymous and does not require registration although there are benefits on on offer if a subscriber does register their details.

Poland has a relatively high penetration of contactless technology which could give the rollout of NFC an extra boost. MasterCard says one in three payment terminals in the country supports PayPass and more than ten percent of all ts transactions in Poland are carried out via Paypass-enabled terminals.

Meanwhile rival T-Mobile is also expected to announce its plans for NFC later this week, reports NFC Times. The operator will also partner with MasterCard and BRE Bank, the parent of mBank.

MasterCard has previously announced that Poland was one of the countries where it would offer NFC-based payment services in partnership with Deutsche Telekom. Previously Poland was billed as a third-quarter debut so the actual launch is running a few weeks behind schedule.

Germany is another market where MasterCard and Deutsche Tekeom are in partnership. In fact, although the two companies announced a European agreement, the only countries definitely slated for launch were Poland and Germany.

In the UK, the Everything Everywhere joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Orange is also working with MasterCard.