NFC Times Exclusive: A former general manager of Taipei’s large contactless transit ticketing and closed-loop payment scheme, EasyCard, has been named chairman of an NFC joint venture set up by Taiwan’s five mobile operators and EasyCard Corp., NFC Times has learned.
Jason Lin, who also previously headed the Taiwanese capital’s department of transportation, was a compromise choice to chair the joint venture, which could not agree on a chairman among representatives of its competing mobile operators.
With the selection of Lin and hiring in August of a chief executive to run the venture, Patrick Hsu, the group can now move forward with a delayed request for proposal to hire a TSM to support expected rollouts of NFC services next year. Hsu was a former sales director for Hewlett-Packard Taiwan and former sales manager at IBM Taiwan.
Taiwan, which has a high percentage of smartphone ownership and a relatively high penetration of contactless point-of-sale terminals, is considered a ripe market for NFC mobile-payments rollouts. And the joint venture Lin and Hsu will help lead was supposed to offer a centralized TSM hub for enabling interoperable NFC services on the island nation.
But with Taiwanese banking groups planning their own TSM joint venture, an uncertain NFC business case for Taiwan's telcos and plans by some issuers to use different secure elements or possibly host-card emulation, it seems likely Taiwan’s NFC ecosystem will remain complex and fragmented.
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Among Topics Covered:
•Telco joint venture chooses compromise candidate as chairman
•Taiwanese banker groups plan their own JV for TSM services
•Plans for RFPs by competing TSM groups
•Unsettled nature of Taiwan’s budding NFC ecosystem
Among companies and organizations mentioned:
EasyCard Corp.
Bankers Association of the Republic of China, BAROC
NCCC
Financial Information Service Co., FISC
Chunghwa Telecom
Taiwan Mobile
Far EasTone
Chinatrust Commercial Bank
Cathay United Bank
Taishin International Bank
E.Sun Commercial Bank
Gemalto
Smart Catch
Morpho
Giesecke & Devrient
SK C&C
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