NFC TIMES Exclusive – Some major cities plan to enable their transit fare payments in the Google Pay wallet, using NXP’s Mifare 2GO provisioning service, NXP Semiconductors confirmed to NFC Times, adding that the implementations could put the fare-payments applications on secure elements.
Google in the past has not generally supported secure elements with Google Pay (formerly Android Pay), with the exception of an implementation in Japan. The new transit-ticketing services in the Google Pay wallet could launch with or without secure elements. They would follow the launch of a small transit fare-collection service for the Las Vegas Monorail, which Google and NXP announced in March. It enabled customers to digitize a Mifare DESFire application from the cloud and buy tickets to load immediately into their Google Pay wallets–in this case not using a secure element.
“We are engaged with cities and contracts are being closed and cities will go live under commercial terms next year, and these definitely are cities beyond the 4 million size of population; so that’s a really big scale,” Christian Lackner, NXP’s business segment director for smart cities, told NFC Times. He declined to reveal which transit agencies have signed contracts.