Singaporean mobile operator StarHub has added an NFC movie-ticketing service to its SmartWallet, although the telco has added few services since launching the wallet last August.
The new service, which StarHub announced today, enables users to tap their NFC phones on kiosks with readers to print movie tickets they bought through the wallet at any of seven locations of the Shaw Theaters chain in Singapore.
Users would browse and book the cinema tickets on the phone then print the stored digital ticket, though it’s not clear whether they would pay with the NFC payment feature at the theaters, as well. The cinema ticketing application does not apparently enable users to tap their phones to transmit the cinema tickets directly to readers, just print them off.
StarHub, part of a government-sponsored NFC consortium, launched its mobile wallet eight months ago and is the most active so far of three Singaporean telcos in the consortium. But use of the SmartWallet is believed to be light and an expected service that would enable users to pay fares on Singapore’s subway and bus network has yet to launch.
StarHub’s mobile wallet mainly enables retail payment applications–one from DBS Bank, the MasterCard PayPass-enabled One.Tap mobile credit card; and two applications from payments service provider EZ-Link Pte.–a PayPass-enabled prepaid card and EZ-Link’s stored-value purse. The latter is based on Singapore’s national CEPAS technology standard.
“It’s not as good as I like to see,” Sim S. Lim, country head for DBS Singapore, told NFC Times in late February of the bank’s NFC payments service. “There are teething problems.”
Lim did not go into detail but did say that one problem he sees is that after signing up customers for the mobile-payments service, the bank has to then tell them to go to the mobile operator to get an NFC SIM card to use the service. Besides StarHub’s SmartWallet, DBS has also made its PayPass credit application available with Singaporean operator M1, which has introduced its own NFC wallet. The M1 Mobile Wallet also includes an EZ-Link stored-value purse and M1’s own co-branded prepaid card supporting PayPass.
Both StarHub and M1 charge consumers one-time fees for the new NFC SIMs, as well as to activate their wallets–an unusual move among the telcos that have launched early commercial NFC services worldwide. For StarHub, those charges are S$37.45 (US$30.19) for NFC SIMs for new customers and S$26.75 for existing subscribers, along with a S$10 ($8.06) fee to activate the wallet.
There are other consumer fees for activating or using the payment cards. DBS charges S$36 per year, though not for the first three years. And it costs consumers S$22 for the preloaded ez-link purse and its prepaid service, called FEVO, together or S$10 for the ez-link purse by itself. Users get S$5 free credit in the purse with the activation.
As part of the launch of the NFC-enabled movie tickets, StarHub said today that it would waive for a limited time the one-time fees for issuing the NFC SIM and activating the wallet, and the fees for the ez-link cards. Consumers also wouldn’t have to pay the $1 ticketing booking fee to Shaw Theaters for the first month after launch of the NFC movie ticketing service, which is scheduled to begin Saturday.
Service Targets Approaching
The NFC consortium, which is funded in part by the Singapore government’s Infocomm Development Authority, or IDA, is led by France-based trusted service manager and SIM vendor Gemalto and also includes telco SingTel and Citibank Singapore. That’s in addition to StarHub, M1 and DBS. The IDA said at the time of the contract award that it, along with the consortium members, would invest a combined S$40 million (US$31.6 million) in the project.
Under its contract, the consortium faces targets to add services and sign up a certain number of users and record a certain volume of transactions. Those targets, at least at the time the contract was awarded, in October of 2011, were at least two payments services at launch and at least one additional payments service and one value-added service 14 months after launch.
And there would have to be two more payments services and two more value-added services available 20 months after launch. One of the services would have to support the local CEPAS technology.
The project was scheduled to launch in June of 2012, but launched two months late, in August 2012, with the PayPass credit card from DBS, along with the PayPass prepaid card and CEPAS e-purse from EZ-Link. There was also NFC couponing from a handful of merchants, which could be redeemed at the same time as users paid for their purchases. The couponing merchants in the StarHub wallet include Shaw Theaters, and this is separate from the NFC movie ticket printing service.
If the IDA is basing the target deadlines on the October 2011 contract award and if it hasn’t changed that contract, that would mean the consortium members or other service providers need to introduce at least two more payments services and one or two more value-added services by this coming June. The payments services would need to be contactless credit applications, complying with PayPass, Visa payWave or other schemes accepted in Singapore. There are 20,000 to 30,000 combined contactless point-of-sale terminals supporting PayPass, payWave and the separate ez-link scheme at retail.
Fare Collection Unlikely to Launch Soon
It appears unlikely the parties would be able to launch NFC fare collection on Singapore’s buses or the metro anytime soon.
A executive with EZ-Link, whose ez-link card is used for fare-collection on Singaporean mass transit, told NFC Times in late February that there have been problems in tests getting different NFC phone models to communicate consistently with bus and metro terminals. This, in part, is caused by the different locations of the antennas on the backs of the phone models used for the NFC services–such as the Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and Sony Xperia phones.
There is also a concern that if conductors had to validate the ez-link payment or ticket, they would have to handle the consumers’ phones, and could drop them.
The NFC—enabled ez-link purse can mainly be used for retail purchases but also to pay taxi fares. StarHub in its frequently asked question section for its SmartWallet, advises users of a “performance issue” with the NFC function in the Galaxy S III, “which results in poor communication with ez-link terminals in taxis. “Please ensure that the NFC function is enabled and bring the handset as close as possible to the terminal when paying a payment,” says StarHub.
It noted a few glitches with other NFC models, including the Sony Xperia sola, in which the wallet doesn’t always communicate with the SIM card. It advises uses to re-enter the six-digit wallet passcode. In addition, the Sony Xperia S has a bug that requires users to restart the phone to complete a payment card activation process. And if the Galaxy S III is restarted for some reason, it has been known to disable the NFC function. Users have to enable the NFC function again.
StarHub noted today it has added the Samsung Galaxy Express to its lineup of five other NFC phones, all Android models. The telco uses mobile wallet software from U.S.-based C-SAM and NFC SIMs from Gemalto.
By the end of 2013, the consortium would have to show a rather modest 30,000 unique users and after six month months, 450,000 NFC payment transactions per month, according to the original targets.
A source told NFC Times last month there are about 10,000 users for the StarHub wallet, though that could not be confirmed.