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Norway: Country’s Largest Bank and Telco Launch New Payment Trial
The new phase of the trial is testing a service dubbed “Tap2Pay,” involving about 250 consumers. They will use the Samsung S5230 NFC phone, which supports the standard for SIM-based NFC applications, the single-wire protocol. The consumers will be able to tap to pay at a limited number of merchants equipped for the trial in the Majorstua district of Oslo, including Kaffebrenneriet coffee bars, outlets of the Vita cosmetics chain and Deli de Luca Group restaurants.
In an earlier trial phase, launched in 2009, vendors modified a Nokia 6131 NFC phone model to support applications on SIM cards. The trial, however, ran into some problems with communication between the phone and point-of-sale terminals for the participating employees. The bank and telco, along with MasterCard, had planned a second phase in 2010, but cancelled it after Nokia killed its planned standardized SIM-based NFC phone, the 6216.
DnB NOR and Telenor in April 2008 announced they would form a trusted service management company, TSM Nordic, to manage applications for what they expected at the time to be a fast ramp-up of NFC services. But little has been heard of that venture. Germany-based smart card supplier Giesecke & Devrient has stepped in with its trusted service management unit, formerly known as Venyon, to manage the MasterCard PayPass application for the new phase of the trial. The G&D TSM ties into MasterCard's MOTAPS, over-the-air provisioning service, which 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.
The phone used in the first phase of the trial, a Nokia 6131 modified to support applications on the the SIM via the the single-wire protocol ran into some problems because of an overly "sensitive connection." The small number of internal users "had to keep the handset a certain way for a certain period of time and for a certain distance from the reader," for the transaction to register, according to a source.
* Trusted Service Manager: Defined loosely to include companies or other organizations securely distributing, provisioning and managing applications, generally over the air, on secure elements in NFC mobile phones; or licensing their platforms for this purpose. N/A: Not available or not applicable. Last update: July 2011
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