It seems EMVCo is ahead of Visa and MasterCard this time, they released requirements for contactless payments by handsets. There are already implementations of Visa and MasterCard’s applications on handsets, but all of them have been dropped before launch -after pilot phase.

Basically, a mobile application is a user interface for accessing the EMV compliant payment application running on the secure element of the handset. Secure element can reside on the NFC controller of the handset or on the SIM card.

What EMVCo requires for these applications are;

• Application should have a soft/hard key for easy access. If it’s a soft key, it must be accessible from the main/home screen.
• Application should inform the handset/card holder when a contactless transaction is in place.
• Application should be secured by a password and it should be configurable to enable/disable the application.
• There should be an indication of contactless capability, just like the bluetooth icon.
• Handset shall provide a mechanism to notify the application when it is powered off.

It is a good effort to draw the boundaries of the environment and will lead the players in the industry to have a single user experience. It seems we will see more mobile payment applications on the market -hopefully in the commercial level rather than pilots.

Original document can be found here.

This has been possible by a company -Laks, whose vision is beyond most of the people in both card payments and watch industry. Laks is a Vienna based company developing very cool watches that have a dual interface chip slot and the watch has an antenna inside the watch. The antenna plugs into a specific type of SIM sized dual interface chip produced specifically to fit in this environment. There is the possibility of running many applications on the chip. Actually there is the possibility of requesting any kind of chip in this form, which means that sky is the limit for implementing a chip application inside a watch. Laks also has native mifare chip embedded into the watch. Although I’ve never asked, I am sure that they can fit any kind of chip inside a watch.

Watches come with the antenna, while the dual interface chips do not necessarily. If so, personalization process must be processed while the chip is in the watch, which is something hard to do when personalizing huge volumes.

In Turkey, Garanti Bank launched a product based on Laks watches a few years ago. It was a little bit early, however it was still a very innovative product. In Turkey, there were efforts to develop a payment product based on Laks’ watches, which some of them had already passed the proof of concept phase, unfortunately they were never launched.

Maybe, the commercialization did not happen due to the fact that watch is a personal thing (like a mobile phone in the NFC case) and a payment product bundled in a personal stuff might not sound good to people. But I am sure there will be some contactless projects based on watches and Laks will definitely have a big role in this picture. There are more interesting watches other than having a contactless capability in Laks’ web site, worth to visit.

Android platform was an initiative by the Open Handset Alliance. Almost all of the researches point out that Android will be one of the most popular mobile operating systems of (very near) future. Android runs not only on mobile phones but a range of mobile devices varying from netbooks to internet tablets. I believe Android will penetrate into more devices like running on  embedded systems.

So what does Gemalto’s joining to Open Handset Alliance mean in terms of contactless systems? First of all, Gemalto is the first and only company on secure payment and identification technology in the alliance. Gemalto is clearly the biggest company that has the expertise on the application level security for payment/identification chips, which I believe will boost the NFC implementation on Android OS. Gemalto has all the necessary know how and sources for developing a generic NFC API for Android which will encourage handset manufacturers for more handsets supporting NFC. On the application level, this will lead the huge Android developer community to implement many NFC applications – and not only payment.

Since it’s now widely believed that next generation iPhone will have some kind of contactless interface, now almost all major mobile platforms (Symbian- of course, iPhone and now Android) will have native support for NFC.

In every NFC promo video, you can see people exchanging contacts and some other information by touching their phones to each other. It seems iPhone will be the first commercially available device to actually do this. I can imagine the ads of the next generation iPhone; how people will be touching their shiny iPhones to other iPhones, Mac Books, iPod Touchs and Apple TVs. This is a very good news for the NFC world.Think of people sending each other files between their iPhones. Banks, fast food restaurants, online stores, almost all types of businesses already have their own iPhone applications. I can imagine how the NFC chip will extend their applications into contactless loyalty schemes or secure identification media. My forecast is that payment will come later, possibly after people are convenient with their iPhone’s contactless ability. Of course the TSM context needs to be stabilised in the minds of decision makers of the payments industry. I hope this happens before the iPhone’s “possible” NFC boom.

On the other hand, just like touch screens, I think this move will lead to many handset manufacturers to follow the lead and integrate NFC chips into their products. Eventually this will lead MNOs to create their value added services on NFC hardware. Banks, transport operators, loyalty schemes, etc will have much more creative products. I think, and strongly believe that current NFC hardware and software developers will be securing their future -hopefully not in a long time.

A recent post on Near Field Communications Group on Linkedin states that Apple is working on some prototype iPhones which have contactless reader. Here’s the full post:

Had to share this news. A highly reliable source has informed me that Apple has built some prototypes of the next gen iPhone with an RFID reader built in and they have seen it in action. So its not full NFC but its a start for real service discovery and I’m told that the reaction was very positive that we can expect this in the next gen iPhone. If Apple does it, expect every phone manufacturer and their sister to begin pumping out NFC enabled phones, at least for service discovery and sync. This just reinforces what we knew based on the two seperate patents Apple submited that had the iPhone enabled to read RFID tags. I’m told that the touch project video and the BT SIG’s specs were all driving forces to push this forward as well as other factors. Guess I’ll be touching my iPhone to my Mac to link them together to sync iTunes by next year.

Nokia has been the leader of NFC innovations in the handset world, but if this happens to be true Apple may go far ahead. And at the same time, it will definitely lead to a boom in NFC applications.