Telefónica has partnered with Spanish banks La Caixa and Santander to deliver mobile payment services and a digital wallet. Users of the new service will be able to gather all their credit cards into the new digital wallet; they will also be able to send and receive funds via their mobile phone. Bank account details will not be necessary; all the sender needs is the recipient’s phone number.

Russian operator MegaFon has become the latest carrier to join Teleónica’s partnership programme, which aims to pool resource, know-how and purchasing power across an international roster of telcos.

Spanish operator group Telefónica has secured €200m of capital from Canada’s export guarantee body Export Development Canada (EDC) to support sales of BlackBerry across its global operations.

UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB has agreed to purchase Telefónica UK’s consumer broadband and fixed-line telephony assets for £180m ($270m), making it the second-largest provider in the UK broadband market.

Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica plans to invest more in its fibre broadband networks in major cities like Madrid and Barcelona this year, and also increase its fibre footprint in smaller cities like Bilbao and Seville.

Two of Europe’s biggest operators, Telefónica and France Telecom have announced their quarterly results, both seeing declines in net profit as they battle with market conditions and increased data usage. Spanish operator group Telefónica saw its net profit fall by 34.4 per cent year-on-year for the half-year, to reach 2.08bn, down from the 3.2bn the firm recorded in the same period a year ago. This is despite the operator’s consolidated first-half revenues totalling €30.98bn; a 0.3 per cent increase year-on-year.

Mobile operator O2 UK has revealed that it expects to run out of spectrum on its macro cell layer around 2014. Speaking at a round table briefing hosted by the Small Cells Forum, Telefonica UK’s chief radio engineer Robert Joyce said that, “As we see it, with the increasing demand from tablets and smartphones the macro cell will not be able to cope. We can take the macro cell grid to eight times its current capacity and then we’ll run out of spectrum.”

Telefónica has announced a new pan-European data roaming tariff for customers, which it claims is up to ten times cheaper than the new price caps approved by the European Parliament this week.

Customers on the Movistar and O2 networks will be able to use up to 25MB of data whilst abroad, anywhere across the 27 European Union member states, for just €2 per day.

There is an interesting parallel between today’s announcement that Telefónica is launching an app-based rich communications play—TU Me—and the unveiling two weeks ago of its O2UK arm’s mobile wallet offering. In both situations, Telefónica is simultaneously leading collaborative efforts along similar lines with the very operators on which it is attempting to steal a march by being quick to market.