Alliance to Accelerate European Deployment of Mobile Payment Services

The GSMA, the global trade body for the mobile industry, and the European Payments Council, which represents 8,000 banks in the European Union and EEA and Switzerland, are to work together to accelerate the deployment of services that enable consumers to pay for goods and services in shops, restaurants and other locations using their mobile phones.

Both the GSMA and the EPC envisage that this cross-industry cooperation will enable banks to deliver better mobile payments services to their customers, supported by mobile operators' infrastructure. These services will be facilitated by a ‘Trusted Service Manager', which will support banks and mobile operators in the distribution, configuration and activation of the bank's payment application on the 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 for a Trusted Service Manager to interface with banks and mobile operators.

"Together, the European Payments Council and the GSMA are well-placed to develop the tools our members need to deploy mobile payment services that will work internationally to the benefit of consumers," said Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer of the GSMA. "We look forward to a productive working relationship with the EPC."

"We are convinced that this cross industry cooperation between GSMA and EPC is the best way forward for efficiently enabling the mobile as a channel for initiation of payments in SEPA, and this cooperation model could also be a model for other parts of the world," said Gerard Hartsink, Chairman of the EPC.

Seven mobile operators - AT&T, FarEasTone, KTF, Orange, SFR, Softbank and Turkcell - are currently running trials of UICC-based contactless mobile payment services and a further seven plan to begin trials in the near future.

The GSMA also announced that it plans to release in the summer a preliminary set of minimum requirements for handsets containing NFC-enabled UICCs and NFC chips that can be used for mobile payments services.

Posted to the site on 1st July 2008