First live mobile NFC payment service in UK

Today is rather an interesting day in our tiny corner of the digital money universe. Today, the first NFC mobile phone with a contactless EMV application on the SIM goes on sale in the UK. It’s the Samsung Tocco Quick Tap, a version of the best-selling Samsung Tacco Lite with NFC, a product developed by Orange and Barclaycard.

Before I go any further let me make an explicit declaration of interest. Consult Hyperion has provided paid professional services to companies mentioned in this post in connection with the development of the products and services discussed in this post. As you may well remember…

…the public launch of a product that Consult Hyperion has been working on for some time for Barclays: Mobile operator Orange UK and credit card company Barclaycard have announced a long-term strategic partnership to develop m-payments technology including mobile wallet handsets.

[From Digital Money: Some real mobile, nfc and payment stuff in the UK]

Back to the story. Today, (well, yesterday, actually) I used one of these phones to buy a cup of coffee in Eat. And it worked. Perfectly. You might not think that’s amazing, but I do, because I know how much work has gone in to implementing a standard contactless EMV application in a standard mobile handset with a standard SIM for use in a standard terminal on a standard network. And it’s for use by normal people, not geeks like me.

The phone has a J2ME “Orange Wallet” that is connected via SWP to a Barclaycard MasterCard pre-paid EMV card application on the SIM. You can either connect this prepaid card to one of your existing Barclaycards or an Orange Credit Card that you apply for on the spot. There’s no “untethered” version that you could not link to an existing card but simply top-up online or in store. It works as you would imagine: for payments under £15 you just tap and go. The wallet contains the basic services you would expect: you can look at transactions, top up the card (I have my phone linked to my Barclaycard OnePulse with the built-in Oyster card) in a simple one-button plus PIN action

Though I say so myself (as a big fan of stickers!!) the integration is nice. The phone implements the usual NFC tag reading, so you can tap things and have URLs or phone numbers pushed on to the phone (the phone comes with a bunch of tags for you to try it out on) and I’m sure that people will find fun things to do with these. I suppose like a lot of people I’d rather have my Orange Wallet running on my iPhone, but this is a great first step and, most importantly, it actually works, it’s not just some Powerpoint at a conference. It will be spreading to smartphones soon and the knowledge and experience gained by Orange and Barclaycard ought to stand them in good stead.

Last week Google confirmed that Android 2.3 will support Near Field Communication, as will Nokia and RIM smartphones, starting next year. And judging from Apple’s recent hiring of an NFC expert , and patent filings for a probably-NFC-powered iTravel app, the iPhone 5 will boast NFC too.

[From I Have Seen The Future, And It Looks A Lot Like Bump (Without The Bump)]

When I took the phone home last night and showed it to a statistically-invalid sample group of four teenagers, I was quite surprised as to how much they liked it. They were familiar with the handset and they like prepaid instruments and all wanted to try it out.

According to the recently released results of a survey from MasterCard; it looks like the public, especially the younger generation, are willing to embrace NFC if it ever becomes the standard method of payment in the future… From their findings, 63% of the US population aged 18-34 would be at ease with using mobile phones to make payments, while in the 35 or older age group, only 37% are comfortable with the idea.

[From MasterCard says NFC will be embraced by the younger generation in the US | Ubergizmo]

All in all I had rather an exciting day of contactless activity, because I popped into Tesco Express to buy a cold drink and noticed that they had installed contactless terminals. But more importantly, they’ve installed them properly. What I mean by this is that when you buy something, the checkout operators scans it and then contactless terminal lights up automatically. You tap and go. Or you tap and wait for a receipt to print out, and go. I was so shocked to see contactless payments implemented so well that I made a video:

Put these two things together: contactless rails and the mobile carriage and you finally have a genuinely new and attractive customer experience. No-one is mad enough to believe that people are so wild about payments that they will buy these phones just because of the on-board Barclays MasterCard (the mass market needs a portfolio of interactive services), but it’s a super first step. Today was a good day.