Components for an interoperable NFC mobile payment ecosystem

Although NFC technology for contactless chip cards (ISO/IEC 14443) is known for over ten years now, the market penetration of mobile phones and payment terminals integrating NFC is rather rare. From a technical point of view, there are no issues that prevent services that are based on NFC from being rolled out. The critical part is to put all the necessary players in place and form an interoperable ecosystem that allows all stakeholders to participate. In this paper we describe a system and the necessary processes for issuing open loop payment schemas on to mobile phones for the existing players. The focus of the concept is the implementation of a technically and commercially feasible system with minimal impact on the existing infrastructure. Hence the integration costs of taking part in the NFC ecosystem are lowered and therefore more attractive. During the analysis a finding was, there is no model for all markets/countries.