NFC Times Exclusive: The cost and complexity of loading and provisioning applications on secure elements in NFC phones has held back mobile-payments rollouts and added to the growing interest of such alternatives as host-card emulation, Bluetooth low energy, even QR codes, observers agree.
But use of SIMs or embedded chips in NFC phones is still the most standardized and mature technology for enabling mobile payments at the physical point of sale, especially such open-loop applications as Visa payWave and MasterCard PayPass. And as NFC Times has reported, the growing interest in alternative technologies has caused such NFC ecosystem players as mobile operators to seek out ways to simplify the process for provisioning secure elements on NFC phones.
One of the simplification measures that has been gearing up for the past two years is the creation of more centralized TSM platforms, which backers contend would greatly decrease the number of connections needed to link service providers with issuers of secure elements, such as mobile operators and handset makers. The backers of the centralized TSM platforms also hope to gain a stronger hand in the market to win business from banks and other service providers.