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­Two executives from China Mobile have been nominated as directors to the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB), the bank said in a statement cited by the Shanghai Securities News. 

China Mobile signed a deal in March this year to buy a 20 percent stake in SPDB for US$5.9 billion. The deal has been approved by regulators. 

It is thought that China Mobile’s investment could be part of a move to boost support for its own mobile payments platform, which based on RF-SIM and is competing with the more generic NFC platform adopted by China Unicom and several other banks. 

The deal makes China Mobile, China’s largest mobile operator, the second-largest shareholder of SPDB with Citigroup as its largest single shareholder.