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INSIGHTS IN THE WORLDWIDE MOBILE FINANCIAL SERVICES MARKET

The Paypers (www.thepaypers.com), the leading independent provider of news and analyses for the global financial services industry, is currently developing a comprehensive initiative focused on the global mobile financial services industry – the Mobile Payments Market Guide 2012.  >>

Projected to account for almost a third of mobile payments transactions by 2014 (source: Research and Markets, 2010), mobile Near Field Communication (NFC) promises to revolutionise both device to device communication, and the way consumers engage, interact and transact with brands. These contactless services present a host of opportunities in payment, transportation, access control and data exchange.

But addressing the challenges of the NFC world is critical to enable its success from a device, network and service perspective. Once again, the role of the ‘Secure Element’ within the device is paramount in managing authentication and certification; not only to ensure the integrity of financial transactions and data exchange throughout the NFC chain, but to deliver the required levels of interoperability as well.

The white paper look at the evolving NFC services market and adresses interoperability issues. It goes a liitle further on from interoperability and touches upon secure application and service lifecycle management and details the specifications and tools SIMalliance has produced over the last ten years to advance interoperability and security in application and service development and deployment. .  >>

This set of industry leading Interoperability collaterals, from the early Java focus through to new technologies such as Smart Card Web Server (available since 2009), including a new set of documentation addressing today’s challenges of NFC technology.

Each of these latter documents - containing detailed specifications, standardisation considerations and pragmatic tips - aim to simplify the development, implementation and support of new NFC contactless services and applications  >>

The SIMalliance Open Mobile API Specification describes how a mobile application running on an open smartphone operating system can access a SIM/USIM or any Secure Element. Release 1 .02 of the specification contains the handling of a transport layer that gives applications the possibility to transmit APDUs to Secure Elements.  >>

The security challenges we’ll see in this second decade of the 21st Century, will directly impact mobile’s ability to structurally change consumer’s lifestyles, will cause reputational issues for brands and perhaps more crucially, will mean that fewer services are used…and that means less money to go around the value chain. This paper highlights the need for a change in how security is approached on the connected mobile device. It focuses on the need to create security (and security policy) at the development stage, and highlights the telecoms industry’s unique position of already having a solution to the problem. It discusses why ‘buy in’ is needed from the application development and operating systems communities, and introduces the SIMalliance’s new Open Mobile API workgroup whose task it is to connect the application, operating system and the operator with the Secure Element found in billions of connected devices right across the world.  >>