The GSMA and the European Payments Council have agreed to accelerate the deployment of mobile payment services.
The GSMA announced that it has reached an agreement with the European Payments Council to fully-define the role of the Trusted Services Manager, which will support banks and mobile operators in the distribution, configuration and activation of the bank’s payment application on the SIM card (UICC) within users’ NFC handsets. The GSMA, through its Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, and the EPC will focus initially on defining a contractual framework document detailing the minimum set of requirements to interface with banks and mobile operators.
Under the GSMA’s Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, seven mobile operators – AT&T, FarEasTone, KTF, Orange, SFR, Softbank and Turkcell - are running trials of UICC-based contactless mobile payment services and a further seven plan to begin trials in the near future.
Besides, the GSMA announced its plan to release a preliminary set of minimum requirements for handsets containing NFC chipsets. The requirements will build upon the standardisation work completed by ETSI, which has selected the Single Wire Protocol to provide the interface between the UICC, recommended by the GSMA as the Secure Element for NFC applications, and the embedded NFC chipset within the handset.
The European Payments Council (EPC) is the trade association representing the European banking industry on payments and is responsible for defining the rules and standards for creating the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). EPC represents 8000 banks in 31 countries (EU, EEA and Switzerland).
