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Orange Group NFC Veteran Barnaud Departs for Wallet Vendor C-SAM

U.S.-based mobile-wallet provider C-SAM has hired Vincent Barnaud, the long-serving contactless services head at France Telecom-Orange group.

Barnaud, who began his NFC work more than seven years ago at Orange, will serve as general manager for the European region for C-SAM, where the wallet vendor is hoping to expand.

Barnaud headed new business development for the Orange group’s NFC and mobile-wallet initiatives and has played a key role in preparing the telco for rollouts of NFC in France, the UK, Poland and, soon, Spain. He has been one of the point men for Orange in dealing with service providers, device makers and other operators.

imageBarnaud served first under Mung Ki Woo, head of NFC and mobile money for Orange, who left the telco in January 2011 to join MasterCard Worldwide as group executive for mobile. Barnaud didn’t get the nod to replace Woo, however, and Orange appointed Thierry Millet, then head of Orange Romania, who returned to France to lead mobile payment and contactless solutions for the Orange group.

Orange has run one of the pioneering NFC programs among mobile operators worldwide and has greatly influenced standards and rules for SIM-based NFC services. It will lead a nationwide launch in its home market of France this year.

C-Sam had combined its position for general manager for the Americas and EMEA, both of which were held by Holger Kunkat, an NFC industry veteran from Philips Semiconductors, now NXP, and SCM Microsystems.

C-SAM has contracts for NFC-enabled wallets with the Isis joint venture in the U.S., Singapore-based telco StarHub, Norway-based mobile-commerce vendor TrustNordics, Australian debit scheme eftpos, and likely the New Zealand joint venture formed by the three major telcos and payments processor Paymark. That is in addition to non-NFC wallet projects.

Most of the NFC wallet contracts are for small organizations so far, except for Isis, which has hired an app developer to build its second-generation mobile wallet. C-SAM will continue to supply the back-end wallet platform.