NFC is back and on the move. Visa and MasterCard both announced support for host-card emulation (HCE) this week and that means near-field communication (NFC), long thought to be finished in the contactless payments world, is alive and doing quite well, thank you. HCE was built into the latest version of Android, version 4.4, nicknamed KitKat. HCE allows payment information, typically a card number, to be securely stored in the cloud. This means mobile payments apps can access that information without resorting to the “secure element,” a piece of hardware in the phone containing the information. Apps, now with the payment information ready, can then use NFC to contact the point of sale. Bypassing the secure element means the dream of paying with one’s phone — at least one’s Android phone — at the point of sale is alive. NFC technology remains hardware-based, but allowing cloud-based payments data removes carriers such as AT&T and Verizon from having a decisive role in the payments process. With their own initiatives such as the ISIS wallet, the carriers were unsurprisingly not supportive of initiatives seeking to access the secure element such as Google Wallet. (ISIS, of course, had no problem getting access to the secure [...]
↧