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MasterCard Worldwide today announced its first partnership with a trusted service manager, Cassis International, to support its “streamlined” system to personalize PayPass contactless applications in NFC phones from various issuers.

The provisioning system, which MasterCard calls MOTAPS, sets up a standardized way to gather up customer payment account data to be delivered directly over the air to secure elements in NFC phones.

That is designed to make it easier for consumers with MasterCard branded credit, debit or prepaid accounts to request to have PayPass applications personalized over the air to their phones, said MasterCard.

It would avoid snags that MasterCard and banks hit during NFC trials, in which personalization bureaus had to manually set up the account data to be downloaded to phones. Working with trusted service managers hired by mobile operators often was difficult, as well. 

“MOTAPS was created to simplify the process of mobile issuance,” James Anderson, MasterCard’s senior vice president for mobile product development, told NFC Times in a statement. “Without it, handset personalization could still happen directly with TSMs. However, this will be a lengthy, difficult and costly process for banks.”

Cassis is the first trusted service manager that MasterCard has announced is working on MOTAPS, which is short for Mobile Over-the-Air Provisioning Service. Cassis would take the account data from a MasterCard service center, probably one located in St. Louis, and deliver it securely to the secure chips, either SIM cards, embedded chips or possibly other secure elements in NFC phones.

MasterCard is working with other TSMs, too, said Anderson, though did not name any of them. And in May, the card network announced that prepaid and mobile transaction processor Carta Worldwide of Switzerland had integrated its system with MOTAPS and would use the system for contactless prepaid issuance.

Cassis CEO Thian Yee Chua said in a statement that the TSM's support for MOTAPS means that “consumers can effectively activate a PayPass-enabled account over the air onto the NFC phone anywhere in the world."

He told NFC Times in a further statement that Cassis would serve as a “bridge” between MasterCard and the secure element, which could be managed by another TSM hired by the owner of that chip, whether the owner is a mobile operator for its SIM cards or a handset maker for its embedded chips. The data preparation and standardized interface designed for MOTAPS should improve global interoperability for distributing PayPass applications on phones, he said.

“With our plan to establish a global TSM network, this will further simplify the needs for MasterCard to discuss with various secure element owners, as we will be able to bridge the deal quickly through our partnerships,” Chua said in the statement.

MOTAPS is not expected to be used to help provision the account data for Citigroup or Google for PayPass payment applications that will be stored in the Google Wallet announced May 26 in New York. The system also is unlikely to be used in the United Kingdom by Barclaycard for its “Quick Tap” NFC launch last month, which is putting a PayPass application onto SIMs issued by mobile operator Orange UK.

MOTAPS, apparently is also designed to enable banks to keep the same personalization bureaus that they use for cards when they move to mobile  payment. The personalization data is aggregated by MasterCard and then handed off to TSMs.

“MOTAPS provides the ability for banks to connect to multiple TSMs without having to go through costly technical integration with each one of them,” said Anderson.