Proxama Blog

Demo Night at MoMo London June 2009

I had an excellent evening at Mobile Monday this week.  I was assigned the task of presenting my work for the past year – the Proxama NFC Wallet - in just 5 minutes.  Making a video proved to be a great way of getting lots of information across within the time-slot, still leaving me loads of time to talk!  A total of 15 people showcased demos but as we stuck within the same groups I only managed to see four other demos - all of which were very impressive! Full details on the MoMo site.

There were plenty of interesting questions from each session.  The audience is technically literate, well versed in mobile and pretty good at asking awkward questions. So - I thought it might be interesting to post some of the questions raised. I hope my answers were clear enough on the day to those who asked.

Recently I saw a demonstration which included peer-to-peer payments, why doesn’t your product include this?

This particular demo shows what's possible using existing payment applications that are specified and certified by schemes such as Visa and MasterCard. And P2P payments are not part of the specification for these products - yet. The industry view - which we share - is that eventually P2P payments will be standard for NFC applications - but it's not there yet. It would be simple to add P2P payment to this demo  - and we have a conceptual demo that does this already - but it doesn't fall under the payment scheme application banner

How would this application be issued to me?

Our demo is made up of two bits of software - (1) the payment application (i.e your debit or credit card) which sits on the SIM and (2) the wallet - which is the user interface software that sits on the handset. There are 3 basic approaches to issuance:

1. Everything is pre-personalised by the operator. Your payment card details are on the SIM and the wallet is on the handset when you get your phone.

2. OTA personalisation. First you load the wallet which lets you add your card applications onto the SIM

3. Phone docking. There's been a lot of talk recently about PC based updating - encouraged by the iPhone model.

Why haven’t we seen this technology already, it exists in Japan today!

The Japanese model was made simple because NTT DoCoMo was the dominant player and had more than 50% market share. They subsidised the new handsets and rolled out NFC. The situation in Europer is more complex, with a more fragmented market.

What handsets does the Wallet operate on today, what handsets will it work on in future?

At the moment there are a couple of handsets the Wallet runs on, the Nokia 6131 and Nokia 6212, these are the two main NFC enabled handsets in production.  In future we know that Nokia have another handset due for Q3 2009 – the 6216, this handset is key because it has the secure element as part of the SIM card, which is what Operators want because they own the SIM space.  We also know that LG and Samsung are releasing handsets due this year, which both also contain UICC based secure elements.

I expected a lot more questioning about the security – usually this is a point of concern whenever credit-cards and payment are mentioned.  I didn’t really get asked much on that, only once did I point out that it’s more secure than your physical wallet.

Big thanks to Daniel Appelquist (twitter @torgo), Helen Keegan (twitter @technokitten) and Alex Craxton (twitter @AlexCraxton) for organising.  You run a very tight ship!

Tagged with Mobile Mobile payments Near Field Communication PayPass Wallets

0 Comments. Posted by James 19 June 2009

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