In a highly noteworthy move which will pave the way for travellers across East Asia to use their mobile handsets for travel as well as payments, common standards for touch-card technology have recently been agreed upon by three bigwig mobile operators in China, Japan, and Korea.

On Monday, the three carriers - China Mobile, Japan's NTT DoCoMo, and Korea's KT - published the technical specifications for "international roaming" with NFC (near field communication) services. Releasing the white paper on NFC `roaming' at the 2013 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, NTT DoCoMo demonstrated roaming-based prototype services.

The demonstration essentially has NTT DoCoMo making payments from a Japanese mobile handset on a South Korean payment terminal. The Japanese handset was running a Korean electronic payment platform called "CardBee" Android app.

With the NFC `roaming' service having the potential to replace the in-store cash payment mechanism which most travelers are quite familiar with, the technical specifications which the three mobile network operators have agreed on will allow consumers to use the NFC payments platform and other services in their home country and abroad.

It has been ever since early 2011 that China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, and KT have been working on NFC `roaming;' and, towards that end, have been involved in the trial of approximately 800 million subscribers, most of them being China Mobile's customers using slower networks on feature phones.