Category Archives: Mobile Wallet

Frustration over my ISIS enabled iPhone

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I am getting a bit tired with my ISIS enabled iPhone. The case added weight to my iPhone. Most of the ISIS transactions didn’t work well. The only good thing is that I am getting free drinks from Jamba Juice until the end of March. Other than card emulation mode, none of the other NFC modes work. I can’t tap an NFC tag or an NFC enabled phone with the case to get the full benefits of NFC.  I think I might switch to an Android phone. Most of the Android smartphones are NFC enabled.

Looking back at the history of NFC’s development, I find the situation kind of ironic.  We had an NFC enthusiast, Google, demonstrate NFC card emulation mode’s value by implementing mobile wallet. Telecoms disabled the capability from the phones because they were developing their own mobile wallet solutions and wanted to control SIM-based NFC. So Google dropped SIM-based NFC, the most direct and secured way to protect security and privacy with Secure Element, and implemented HCE (Host Card Emulation) based mobile wallet. Even though it’s not as secure as a SIM-based solution, the HCE solution is beyond the control of telecoms.

Control provokes innovation by requiring creative solutions to market dominant. History repeats!

On the other end, Apple has been filing patents for NFC communication technology but still hasn’t added NFC capability into their devices. Their blue ocean strategy is to find a market space with no competitors. At the same time, their actions have slowed down the adoption of NFC technology and pushed BLE forward. Apple is also exercising a control with its vast user market. Again, innovation will emerge to escape the control. History will repeat.

NFC Solutions Summit 2014 will be held in Austin, TX on June 2-4. I trust that the NFC ecosystem will demonstrate strength and creativity on mobile wallet solutions through collaboration and innovation. Extreme early discount to purchase a ticket is available until April 2nd. Reserve your seat now!

 

NFC iPhone 4 ISIS Mobile Wallet Experience

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Yesterday, I went to an AT&T store to enable ISIS mobile wallet in my iPhone 4. Even though Apple hasn’t added NFC chips into their devices, iPhone cases with NFC chips embedded are sold. There are two different cases available. One is Incipio’s CASHWRAP™ Mobile Wallet Case and the other is Isis Ready® Case. I chose an Isis Ready® Case.

The rep, having enabled her own iPhone 4s for ISIS, was very helpful to assist me. She put a micro SD into the case and provisioned my phone for ISIS payment. I went through a verification process to set up the mobile payment. I chose to use American Express Serve and received $50 credit upon activation. It took some effort (many taps) for the payment reader to recognize an NFC payment, but I was able to apply the $50 credit towards purchasing the case.

Then, I went into Jamba Juice to test out ISIS payment.  Jamba Juice offers free drinks until the end of March when customers use ISIS to pay. People working at the Jamba Juice helped me to use ISIS, though it didn’t work after many tries. They said they got a lot of “not working” ISIS payments, but they still gave away free drinks anyway to honor the offer. I wonder whether AT&T or ISIS keep in touch with the point of sale and collect initial surveys about  ISIS mobile wallet user experiences.

Today, I went to another AT&T store to find out how my ISIS transactions can be improved. Was my iPhone 4 too slow? Was the connection between my iPhone and the case working correctly? Was the particular case broken? The store rep informed me that I needed an ISIS SIM card to communicate with the reader. They installed a new SIM card into my iPhone. I went to anther Jamba Juice shop to test it. This time, it worked on the first try and the store indicated that they had quite a few people coming in with ISIS mobile wallet and that they didn’t have many problems accepting these payments.

It’s good to know ISIS mobile wallet does work for iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s. I will do more research about the ISIS SIM necessity for iPhone. The NFC cases are also available for iPhone 5. I wonder if we will still need an extra NFC case for iPhone 6. I am sure it’s a question in many people’s mind.

If developers are interested in learning NFC coding, please look into the NFC Forum Spotlight for Developers event happening next Friday March 21st in San Francisco. It’s much better to be prepared to write NFC apps before the technology takes off.

Are you using ISIS Mobile Wallet? What is your experience?

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EMV and NFC Adoption

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Are you a victim of the recent Target credit card breaches? Today, most US credit cards use a magnetic stripe to read and record account data and signatures for verification. This mechanism became vulnerable to fraud when technology emerged to enable the illicit reading, writing, and subsequent cloning of these magnetic stripes. Recent data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus demonstrated these vulnerabilities.

EMV (Europay, Master card and Visa) standards were created to reduce counterfeit such as this. They have been specifying interoperability between EMV-compliant chip cards and card payment terminals throughout the world for over a decade. Banks in many countries adopted the technology and started to use chip cards. Chip cards have a microchip embedded in them. The majority of the implementations of EMV cards and terminals confirm the identity of the cardholder by requiring a PIN (Personal Identification Number).

In spring 2009, Canada Trust announced the adoption of EMV standards and explained what a chip card was in an article titled “Payment Card progress: what it means to your business”. The article stated that one of the new fraud prevention technologies that may have the most immediate impact on how merchants do business is the chip card. The chip card is a contactless card with a microchip and a radio antenna embedded inside. It can be simply waved in front of a secure, contactless reader for a secure way to pay.” These chip cards used by Canada Trust use RFID technology.

As the world is moving to a more secure way to implement credit card purchasing, one might wonder why the USA adoption of this technology is delayed, and what the impact of this delay is.

To me, two big potential impacts might be:

  • More credit fraud will happen in the US since the rest of the world is using more secured cards.
  • NFC mobile payments are a less attractive option for consumers since NFC technology might take a while to be adopted.

What is your thought about this?

See more information about EMV here.

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ISIS – Not an Option for my Galaxy 3

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Yesterday, I was at the AT&T Store to get an ISIS SIM card in order to use ISIS mobile payment. The rep was very excited since this was the first time she has activated an ISIS SIM card. The store manager Chris was next to us assisting her. He was very pleasant and introduced Digital Life products to me while we were waiting for ISIS to work.

After trying two ISIS SIM cards, three reboots of the phone,  four technical support calls and 1.5 hours waiting, my Samsung Galaxy 3 kept on returning with an error message that read “ISIS requires a new SIM card with a Secure Element”.  Tech support was transferred from AT&T to ISIS and the problem remained. So ISIS tech support suggested to transfer back to AT&T tech support. Finally, we decided that ISIS was not going to be an option for my phone.

I looked at the Google Play store and found similar dissatisfied comments made by other consumers. Carriers have some work to do to fix these problems.

ISIS Mobile payment started its trial last fall in Austin and Salt Lake City. It uses NFC technology for data exchange and secure element in the SIM card to save credit card information. Since a SIM card is hard to hack, a SIM based secure element is a more secure solution. Secure element will also be used for storing credentials for building access; for example hotel room locks or office building access.

The transportation market segment is also planning to store credentials to SIM based secure element so that mobile phones can be used to pay transit fare. Since the carriers’ infrastructures are not ready, the transportation market may get impatient and give up on secure element.

I hope the future secure element based NFC applications will work well so that consumers can really enjoy NFC technology and pick up the technology as Asia and Europe have. A good news is that ISIS has introduced ISIS Alliance Program to support the ecosystem. We shall keep an eye on its development.

NFC Mobile Payment and ISIS

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Seattle Technical Forum held its monthly meeting on November 13th. I was invited to speak on NFC (Near Field Communication). Most of the audience was not familiar with the technology. As an introduction, I did a demonstration by tapping an NFC-enabled phone to a tag pasted on my business card. The audience was surprised to see my Amazon author page show up on the phone as a result. This demonstrated how NFC tags can be used to distribute information.

In my 15 minute presentation, I explained basic NFC technology, shared some current NFC applications, compared QR code with NFC tag usage and shared my vision of NFC’s potential. Karl J. Weaver, another NFC presenter, explained NFC secure mode in detail and focused on the mobile payment landscape. His speech was uploaded to YouTube. Drawing on his working experience in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong for Gemalto over the last five years, he offered a lot of insights on NFC mobile wallet.

In the Q/A session, the majority of the questions asked were on NFC security. People were curious about the adoption rate of the ISIS mobile wallet and the compatibility between chipset Secure Element used in Europe vs. SIM-based Secure Element used in ISIS.

ISIS, launched today, is a joint venture of T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon. It’s an NFC mobile wallet implementation that allows NFC-enabled mobile phones to serve as a wallet. This is a link to AT&T’s announcement, which includes steps that need to be taken in order to enable NFC mobile wallet. NFC World also shows video clips on how to use ISIS.

Currently, ISIS only works with Android devices and there are limited merchants. Since telecoms haven’t promoted NFC-enabled phones despite their rapid release last year,  it will be interesting to watch how consumers adopt ISIS.

It was a pleasure to present in the Seattle Technology Forum. Other speakers, Roy Leban (Why Mobile Doesn’t Matter), Arvind Krishnan (Negotiating the Mobile First Challenge) and Jeremy Foster (Mobile UX Paradigms) all had awesome presentations and invoked lively discussion with the audience.

New iPhones’ Impact on NFC

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Today, Apple announced the upcoming release of iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C. There are descriptions and discussions about the two iPhones to be released. Unfortunately the revelation that neither phone will have NFC capabilities is a disappointment for the NFC ecosystem.

Despite this fact, iPhone Touch ID, a new fingerprint sensor feature for authentication, may have significant implications for the NFC ecosystem. One of the values that NFC provides is security. Common practice is to save sensitive information in the Secure Element (SE).  For example, ISIS, a joint venture between AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, uses this practice for secure mobile payment. With this approach, permission is needed to access SE. Permission is granted after a successful authentication from carriers.

Touch ID has the potential to be utilized as an authentication option for accessing SE. Moreover, Touch ID could limit the need for using UICC/SIM based SE. UICC/SIM based SE is an operator-centric option, since carriers control the access of the UICC/SIM. It provides ultimate security because no one can access it without a carrier’s permission. 

Many stakeholders in the NFC ecosystem want to bypass carriers’ control over SE. Touch ID has the potential to shift our perspectives on security and authentication. What are your thoughts on this possibility?

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NFC Mobile Wallet and Incoming WIMA-USA Conference

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A friend called me from an AT&T store. “Hi. I want to buy a phone that does Google wallet, and I can’t get a straight answer from the sales person.” Apparently it is very confusing for consumers to know their options in selecting a phone that works with mobile wallet. Here is some information on this topic for curious minds.

Google wallet uses NFC technology. This is how it work.

  • User owns an NFC enabled Android phone.
  • User downloads a mobile wallet app from Google Play, an app store, to their phone.
  • User launches the app and enters credit card information to it.
  • User uses the phone to pay bills at stores that have NFC readers available.

Google wallet was released in 2011. The mobile phones sold in Verizon and T-mobile stores don’t support it because Verizon, T-mobile, and AT&T all invested into ISIS, a mobile wallet joint venture. ISIS was in trial in Salt Lake City and Austin in 2012 and will be rolled out nationally sometime in the near future. If you are interested in these topics, you might want to consider attending the WIMA-USA conference.

WIMA-USA NFC & Proximity Solutions conference will be held in San Francisco on Oct 28-30th. The conference will have a rich conversation about contactless communication including NFC, Bluetooth, and QR code. An Early Bird 20% discount on the Full Access Pass (1or 2 days) is available until September 13th using code: EBUS13.

This is the 3rd WIMA conference in USA and you can read about my WIMA NFC 2012 conference experience here.

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