HSBC Credit Card Services, the US credit card unit of one of the world's largest financial services companies, has launched a mobile phone payments pilot, in partnership with MasterCard and ViVOtech. The six-month pilot tests the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled mobile phones to make contactless credit card purchases. More than 200 HSBC employees in New York, Chicago and several other large U.S. cities used a simple, "over-the-air" (OTA) personalization process to securely load their HSBC credit card data onto their mobile phones.