GSMA backs contactless payments for mobile

THE BODS that run the GSM mobile phone industry, the GSMA, have thrown their rattles out of the pram and demanded that, from mid-2009, mobile handsets should support an NFC capability for contactless payments.

In layman's terms that means that you should be able to go up to a turnstile on the London Underground and pay for your ticket by waving your handset over the contactless yellow readers as if there was an Oyster card inside the phone.

There's already a standard for contactless communications which the mobile phone industry has incorporated into NFC – Near Field Communication.

For the whole thing to work, however, you need some form of authorisation for payments. The obvious thing to do is utilise a SIM card because A) all GSM handsets have them and B) they are a pretty damned secure way of paying for things in the first place.

So at this week's industry shindig in Macau, China, the GSMA has thrown its weight behind the ‘Single Wire Protocol’ interface. In essence, this will enable an NFC chip inside the phone to talk to the SIM card.

Being politically correct, the GSM prefers to call these cards Universal Integrated Circuit Cards (UICCs) which includes those SIM cards inside non-GSM phones.

As the GSMA quite accurately points out, consumer trials with NFC style handset payments have proved extremely popular with the general public.

And thumbing their Gallic noses at our American cousins, the French are way ahead here. No fewer than seven banks and four mobile operators – including Orange and SFR - have been involved in the French trial.

The GSMA says that over 90 per cent of participants in the trial said they found contactless mobile payment convenient and easy to use. Furthermore, 94 per cent of them declared that they would recommend it to their friends and family.

Naturally, the French call the scheme 'Payez Mobile' which sounds better than the GSMA's Pay-Buy-Mobile. Just like GSM makes more sense if you know it originally meant Groupe Special Mobile.

The GSMA should easily get its way, too, given that LG, Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung (four of the five top phone vendors) are developing phones for NFC-enabled mobile payment services. As is France's Sagem, of course. µ