An approach to a decentral mobile payment system using NFC and the German eID-Card

Smartphones instead of cash: mobile phone manufacturers, network operators and financial institutions committed themselves to make mobile phones ready for money exchange. A study of the Handelsblatt [1] assumes that the expansion of mobile devices in the next years will increase significantly. According to this trend it is clear why the topic of mobile payment is discussed more recently in research and industry. In this paper we will demonstrate a software system which handles the payment process through the usage of a mobile device and a decentral payment server. The decentral payment server works like a transaction gateway between the mobile device and the corresponding bank server using the FinTS protocol. For user authentication abstract methods like NFC (ex. German eID-Card) or services like PayPal, REST or LDAP can be used which make the system flexible for many different use-cases. The system can be used within the mobile operating systems Android, iOS and Windows Mobile. Another important fact is the decentralization of the system because this will lead to a very inexpensive system regarding transaction fees and the possibility to host the payment system in-house makes the system interesting for companies. By using this decentral architecture there will not be a central payment provider holding thousands of interesting transaction data which could be a target for data theft or data profiling. To proof this concept a sample project was implemented and will be shown at the end of this paper.