Near Field Communications Handsets and Tags, NFC Pilots and Projects

Fed helps mobile payment get on track

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Boston have helped a number of leading telecom and e-payment companies reach a consensus on several issues dividing the mobile payments industry, according to Digital Transactions.

The Feds have to date hosted three of these meetings consisting of about 20 industry representatives, including software companies, processors, merchant and wireless trade groups, carriers, banks, and card-network companies.


A fourth meeting is scheduled for October, during which the group will attempt to produce a paper mapping out a strategy for advancing mobile payment, which up until now has been hindered due to disagreements between companies on technical matters.

These arguments have concerned security, where e-wallets should be kept, division of transaction fees, and most importantly, dynamic authentication, which is the process of generating on-the-spot unique identification credentials for transactions, according to DT.

The hope is that the resulting paper can be presented at conferences and circulated throughout various relevant industries to stimulate cooperative discussion on mobile payment.

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On Track Innovations has received a U.S. patent for adding contactless capability to existing mobile handsets through contactless SIM technology.

U.S. Patent No. 8,090,407, aka “Contactless Smart SIM,” covers the capabilities necessary to turn existing mobile handsets into NFC-enabled devices through the use of a SIM card and a specifically designed antenna, all while keeping the phone and operating system “fully agnostic,” says OTI.

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CARTES in North America, a new annual card manufacturing, payment, identification and digital security expo and conference, has placed mobile payments at the center of its agenda of this year’s inaugural event.

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Collis has announced the launch of its Visa Mobile Payment Specification (VMCPS) Test Suite, enabling the functional testing of UICC or secure element-based contactless mobile payments applications.

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Swedish mobile operators Telia, Tele2, Telenor and 3 have formed a joint venture to offer a unified mobile wallet service. Operating under the name “4T,” the partners plan to deliver a mobile payments service that can be used on all handsets regardless of the cellular network.

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Mobile payment solution provider I Love Velvet announced that it has reached the second level of EMV certification (EMV2) which authorizes PIN and integrated chip payments from debit, credit and smart cards around the world.

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Visa Europe has announced that NFC-enabled smart phones from Samsung, LG and Research In Motion have been certified for use with Visa payWave, Visa’s mobile application for payments at the point-of-sale.

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