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| Next big thing: pay phones? |
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| Wednesday, 02 July 2008 | |
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(No not those – mobiles used as transaction terminals).
This week the GSMA mobile trade body and the European Payments Council, an organisation representing 8,000 banks in the European Union, the EEA and Switzerland, announced they were to work together to accelerate the deployment of services that enable consumers to pay for goods and services in shops, restaurants and other locations using their mobile phones. Both the GSMA and the EPC hope that this cross-industry cooperation will enable banks to deliver better mobile payments services to their customers, supported by mobile operators’ infrastructure. These services will be facilitated by a ‘Trusted Service Manager’, which will support banks and mobile operators in the distribution, configuration and activation of the bank’s payment application on the Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC) within users’ Near Field Communications (NFC) handsets. The GSMA, through its ‘Pay-Buy-Mobile’ initiative, and the EPC will focus initially on defining a contractual framework document detailing the minimum set of requirements for a Trusted Service Manager to interface with banks and mobile operators. “Together, the European Payments Council and the GSMA are well-placed to develop the tools our members need to deploy mobile payment services that will work internationally to the benefit of consumers,” opines GSMA cto Alex Sinclair. “We are convinced that this cross industry cooperation between GSMA and EPC is the best way forward for efficiently enabling the mobile as a channel for initiation of payments in SEPA, and this cooperation model could also be a model for other parts of the world,” adds Gerard Hartsink, EPC chairman. The GSMA/EPC initiative comes as the GSMA announces plans to release this summer a preliminary set of minimum requirements for handsets containing NFC chipsets. Developed by mobile operators supporting the GSMA’s Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, the requirements are designed to help handset manufacturers develop NFC-enabled phones that are compatible with operators’ planned mobile NFC services, and that realise economies of scale. The requirements will build upon the standardisation work completed by ETSI. The European standards body has selected the Single Wire Protocol to provide the interface between the UICC, recommended by the GSMA as the Secure Element for NFC applications, and the embedded NFC chipset within the handset. The NFC chip can communicate with existing contactless readers to deliver a range of secure, interoperable and transparent services, such as credit and debit payments. “We are looking for manufacturers to produce a wide range of UICC-based NFC handsets that will support the many contactless applications being developed by mobile operators and their partners around the world,” reports Sinclair. “We expect mobile operators to begin placing orders for these handsets this year as they prepare to rollout mobile NFC services, some of them in partnership with banks and credit card issuers.” Mobile payment, mCommerce, NFC – call it what you will – is already getting some considerable traction around the world. This is evidenced by: · the circumstance that the US Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) recently launched an initiative to examine the various technology models supporting mobile payments; the FSTC is intending to make recommendations on an approach that would facilitate an interoperable mobile payments infrastructure in the future. More than 25 organisations from banking, wireless carriers and technology providers are participating in this initiative to provide a broad view of the current environment and best practices · the launch by mobile operator Softbank of a trial of UICC-based NFC payment services in A recent analysis from IMS Research (click) suggests that the combined number of users worldwide of mobile banking, contact-less mobile payments and over the air (OTA) transactions will reach 884mn in 2012. These save- and spend-as-you-go individuals are expected to complete 62bn transactions between them in that year. No sale? Not everyone is buying into the mobile commerce deal, though. A study released last month by Unisys Corp, for example, while acknowledging that the cell phone is practically universal, with more than 3.3bn subscribers worldwide, nevertheless found that 71% of all consumers surveyed in 14 countries would not consider using a mobile device to bank or shop online. That research, conducted with the latest installment of the Unisys Security Index, also reveals that more than half of all respondents (59%) do not trust their mobile devices to provide a secure transaction. Moreover, only 9% currently use these devices to conduct transactions involving credit-card payments, money transfers and deposits. John Williamson |
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