NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – While the recent promotion by the makers of Lucozade Energy drinks in the UK, which enabled users to tap their bottles on contactless readers to redeem free rides on the London Underground, may have been just a clever marketing stunt, the way the drinks company got the prepaid EMV application onto the bottles broke the mold for how such applications usually get provisioned.
The company and its technology implementer, UK-based DigiSEq, provisioned and personalized the single-use EMV application in the Lucozade warehouse, not in a secure data center, which is required for personalizing EMV cards and, to date, most payments wearables with EMV applications.
Pretty much the only devices being provisioned with EMV payments applications outside of secure data centers are NFC smartphones and high-end wearables, such as the Apple Watch. If there is a secure element, then trusted service managers are needed to do this provisioning.