Following agreements with Visa and Carta Worldwide, bank card payments via Vodafone Wallet will be enabled in European markets from the second quarter of 2015, the operator announced.

This means customers will be able to add bank cards to their Vodafone Wallet and use smartphones to pay for goods and services at contactless terminals, as well as checking their mobile payment transaction history.

This service, which requires a Vodafone NFC SIM, will be supported on a range of Android smartphones.

To use the service, customers will need to input their bank card details to the Vodafone Wallet app, where an alias of each card will be stored securely in the Vodafone NFC SIM.

Ownership of the card will be authenticated using ‘Verified by Visa’.

Payments will be automatically debited from the selected bank cards, protected with a user-defined 4-digit PIN for higher value payments.

According to Brian Semkiw, CEO of Carta Worldwide, which partnered with Vodafone to provide the payment card enabling technology, the company’s “next generation platform is built to provide the highest security and reliability standards. At the same time, the flexibility of our platform has allowed us to develop this innovative service with Vodafone in record time”.

Vodafone Wallet is currently available in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the UK.

Customers can already add loyalty cards into the Vodafone Wallet, as well as pay with Vodafone SmartPass, which was launched in partnership with Visa in 2013.