Airtel Ghana is to offer a payments terminal made by US vendor Verifone to the country’s merchants, as a means to open up contactless payments to the operator’s money subscribers.

The NFC-based terminals enable users to tap and pay using either their NFC-based smartphones or via an NFC-enabled sticker attached to their feature phone.

Usually mPoS (mobile Point of Sale) services are designed for shopkeepers to accept credit and debit cards but Airtel’s is designed for payments from users’ mobile wallets. The operator says it has 1.5 million subscribers in Ghana with money accounts.

Overall, Airtel is the country’s fourth largest operator with an estimated 3.84 million mobile connections (Q1 2015 figures), according to GSMA Intelligence.