The NFC Forum is a group of organisations and individuals who are involved in Near Field Communications services. Traditionally, their members were from SIM Card vendors, banks, mobile phone companies and NFC hardware vendors.
So, on the whole you would expect them to promote NFC using these building blocks.
NFC for years promised to be the next big thing and for years it disappointed, mainly due to the lack of handsets, which meant no customer adoption, which meant no retailer support.
Any company operating outside the restrictions of SIM/Smart card based services (mobile operators, banks and hardware suppliers) has found the lack of handsets to limit the services they can give.
No retailer is going to support a service which is only available to a limited number of its customers.
The Cloud is your Platform
So, many of these NFC service providers, such as ZAPA and PayPal, have moved towards Cloud Based NFC instead of the established NFC Forum view of NFC.
In Cloud Based NFC, the handset and the point of sale merely become on-line devices, accessing cloud based services for balances, coupons, payment, etc. The handset memory just becomes a means to store a simple customer specific identification (i.e. a mobile PAN number).
The point of sale can capture the mobile PAN in a simple RFID exchange and from there on, it accesses the same cloud services to perform transactions such as loyalty, pre-pay, couponing, etc. If the customer looses their phone or RFID device, no problem. Just reassign your cloud account to a new device and move on.
NFC Forum Methods
The standard NFC Forum view would be that these balances and coupons are stored locally on the handset in a secure memory area. But, when some of your key members supply SIM and Smary Cards, then of course you are going to promote this type of solution.
A by-product of this is that once a SIM card is the secure memory element in an NFC solution, then you need secure protocols to access it over the air, which just so happens to be based on the same Global Platform standards that the same SIM companies use for mobile SIM cards and payment card Smart Card chips. It is all a bit....close.
Stick to the Cloud!
So, even though NFC enabled handsets are not appearing in volume on the high street, why don't we all just stay with the Cloud NFC model?
Point of Sale systems and handsets are now on-line systems, so let's not ignore this. Let's use these channels as a means to expand on cloud based services and release retailers and consumers from the restrictions of SIM based NFC.
No comments:
Post a Comment