A joint venture between two of New Zealand's biggest banks and all three mobile phone networks has launched a mobile wallet for Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards that can be used with contactless terminals.National Australia Bank's Bank of New Zealand and Commonwealth Bank of Australia's ASB are the launch bank partners in the Semble mobile wallet venture with Spark (formerly Telecom), Vodafone and 2 Degrees.The mobile wallet will be available as an application that can be downloaded from the Google Play store for use on Android phones with near field communication technology on the three phone networks. Semble, which until now has been called the TSM venture, has been a long-awaited and much discussed project in New Zealand banking and card payments circles, given the partners involved and the potential breadth of its coverage.TSM was a joint venture between Paymark, the payments operator owned by the big four banks that operate the EFTPOS network, and the three mobile phone networks. It was seen as having the potential to transform the mobile contactless market in one fell swoop, but its launch has been delayed and it was hit by the defection of Westpac from the project earlier this year, when it decided to go it alone with its own digital wallet.Semble chief executive Rob Ellis said he was still in discussions with ANZ and he was hopeful they would join. He told Banking Day that Semble would launch with a pilot for 250 users next month before a full launch "early next year", where ASB and BNZ customers could download Semble from Google Play and load up their Visa and Mastercard contactless cards virtually.Air New Zealand customers with Airpoints-earning GlobalPlus cards would also be able to load them onto the Semble app. Ellis said Samsung New Zealand had also signed up as a marketing launch partner and would pre-load Semble onto its new NFC-enabled phones. It would also push the app out to existing Samsung NFC phone owners in operating system upgrades.He said about one million, or more than 20 per cent of New Zealand's mobile phones, would be NFC-enabled Android phones by early next year and would be capable of being used at 16,000 contactless terminals. Semble was also still in discussions with Apple about it being available through its store and useable on the new Apple iPhone 6, which has the NFC chip. The mobile wallet can be used when the power is off and Semble can be used with or without a password input every time. Ellis said a Semble television advertising campaign was not being planned, but its launch partners BNZ, ASB, Spark, Vodafone, 2 Degrees, Samsung and Air New Zealand may launch their own campaigns to promote the mobile wallet.Ellis described Semble as an unusual collaboration in banking and payment circles."Despite many people not believing it was ever going to happen, we've created a uniquely Kiwi collaboration between the banking and telco industries," he said.Semble also planned to include loyalty vouchers and transport payment