Facing Threats, Telcos and Other Players Seek to Cut Cost and Complexity of NFC

NFC ecosystem players are moving to simplify the costly and complex process for putting payment applications on secure elements, as they face mounting frustration at the pace of rollouts–and growing threats from such alternatives as host-card emulation.

Among the organizations taking steps is the GSMA, the big trade group representing mobile operators worldwide. The association has already decided to develop a standardized backend and common APIs for mobile operator wallets, hoping to simplify the process that banks and other service providers could use to integrate their applications in the wallets, sources with knowledge of the plans told NFC Times. 

And the GSMA also is discussing ways to simplify the provisioning of payment applications on SIMs from TSMs. 

Moreover, the trade group is evaluating a bolder plan, likely for the long term, to drastically reduce the cost to banks and other service providers to implement their applications on SIMs, sources said. 

The GSMA initiatives, most of which are still in the discussion stage, are believed to have the backing of such large telcos as Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telenor, China Mobile and South Korea’s KT. 

The success of the measures depend on just how urgent operators believe the problems besetting the current state of the NFC ecosystem have become. 

Key among the standards organizations that the GSMA will be working with is GlobalPlatform. That includes implementing a GlobalPlatform initiative called the end-to-end simplified deployment framework, which seeks to simplify the provisioning of applications from TSMs to SIMs. 

GlobalPlatform last week published the first version of the framework, a measure that was first proposed by MasterCard Worldwide. 

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Graphics: 

• Simplifying NFC: Ecosystem Players Forced to Get      Serious About Cutting Cost and Complexity 
• Choose Your Configuration: End-to-End Framework Cuts Options to Simplify      Implementations

Among Topics Covered:

• Measures being considered by telco trade group GSMA and telco members to       simplify provisioning of applications on SIMs
• GlobalPlatform’s end-to-end simplified service deployment framework      explained
• Reducing connections: TSM aggregators and hubs

Among companies and organizations mentioned:

GSMA
GlobalPlatform
Orange
Deutsche Telekom
China Mobile
Telenor
KT
MasterCard Worldwide
Google 

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