As Germany gears up for NFC, German bank Dortmunder Volksbank along with Telefónica (O2) Germany have launched a small pilot putting a credit application onto SIM cards in Western Germany.

There are few active contactless point-of-sale terminals yet in Germany, and most consumers who use cards, use debit, not credit. But hardware is in place for many more contactless terminals to become live this year. And German telcos and some other players are gearing up for commercial launches in 2013.

That includes Deutsche Telekom, which plans a launch of its NFC-enabled MyWallet this summer. And Germany’s two other major telcos besides Telefónica O2, Vodafone and E-plus, are believed to be gearing up to introduce their own mobile wallets that will be able to support NFC.

O2, in what it called a “friendly user test,” launched its own payment application supporting PayPass, under its mpass brand, earlier this year, with Germany-based payments services provider Wirecard. The telco has also distributed contactless stickers. The telco commercially launched network-based peer-to-peer payments from its O2 Wallet in mid-February, using its mpass Internet payment system.

O2 said in January that this year it would be “expanding its wallet service to include additional applications and functions, such as other payment cards, vouchers and loyalty schemes. The first bank will shortly be joining the wallet scheme, allowing the integration of a digitalized credit card.”

It’s not clear whether the telco was talking about possible expansion plans with Dortmunder Volksbank, which is part of the WGZ Bank system, a group of cooperative banks in Rhineland and Westphalia regions of Western Germany.

Germany-based Giesecke & Devrient is providing the trusted service management for the trial, via DG Verlag, a systems integrator and a payment technology partner for the cooperative banks. G&D said DG Verlag would decide whether to expand the pilot or roll out the technology offer to other cooperative banks based on results of the trial.

That trial, with Dortmunder Volksbank, includes 150 users, who can use the SIM-based PayPass credit applet with NFC-enabled Samsung Galaxy S III and Galaxy Ace 2 smartphones. Telefónica has also made these handsets available for its mpass NFC payment trial. G&D provides the NFC SIMs for both of the projects.

Germany has only a few thousand POS terminals activated, but some estimates say it has hardware in place that could lead to a couple of hundred thousand contactless terminals going live and supporting MasterCard PayPass and Visa payWave by the end of the year.

A survey conducted by German standards organization GS1 Germany and EHI Retail Institute at the end of last year showed that a little more than half of merchant respondents in Germany believe there will be a “comprehensive implementation” of contactless POS terminals by 2015.