MeaWallet, a white label solution that supports mobile payments via NFC, Bluetooth LE, host card emulation (HCE), QR and more, is to be launched in May this year, enabling retailers, banks, MNOs and service providers to support a wide range of options for making mobile purchases in stores .

SANDTORV: "It's not the bank's wallet, it's not the MNO's wallet, it's your wallet"

The Norway-based company is working with worldwide partners including IBM, Tieto, Elavon, PayEx, Retain24, Bell ID, C-Sam, Visa and MasterCard to deliver a solution that supports access cards, coupons, loyalty cards, ID cards, tickets and mobile receipts as well as payments. "All types of smart devices and secure elements" will be supported, the company says.

"We have built a secure framework for a mobile wallet which is independent of the MNOs, retailers, operating systems and even the mobile device," Lars Sandtorv, CEO of MeaWallet, told NFC World.

"The whole idea with what we're doing is that we are trying to help open up the market so it can grow faster and cheaper. What we have done is make the solution support a variety of different technologies, such as NFC, QR codes and BLE; this means that this is really, really flexible."

"Our strategy is that this is your wallet — it's not the bank's wallet, it's not the MNO's wallet, it's your wallet, the consumer's, and what you have in your wallet is what you have decided on," Sandtorv continued.

"How you and how your wallet communicate with the point of sale is up to the point of sale to decide, but we have decided to deliver a complete turnkey solution so that it can support any kind of communication. This is only technology, and this can easily be solved.

"There are also several ways for consumers to fund their payments; they can either store a bank card, credit card, debit card or prepaid card and additionally, they can choose to do a top-up of their wallet from their debit or credit card. This is made really flexible so the user can choose how they want to pay and the retailer can choose what to accept or not."

"The first public release will be in May this year and the second release will be in June and then you will see a lot of new stuff coming out," Sandtorv added. "It will be an international solution; we have now done pilots for a while and we will, in May, go to full production."