A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been agreed between the decision making body of the European payments industry, the European Payments Council (EPC) and GlobalPlatform, the international specification body for smart card infrastructure, to coordinate their work initiatives within the mobile contactless environment.
By signing the MoU the two parties aim to promote the availability of interoperable and neutral technology that will support a flexible and sustainable mobile payments marketplace.
The formal liaison relationship between the EPC and GlobalPlatform will ensure that the mobile contactless technical specifications and use cases of each organization are compatible and adhere to pre-defined common requirements for mobile payments. By synchronizing their activity the organizations will minimize the duplication of effort, have access to member-only work priorities, and capitalize on the impressive wealth of market and technical expertise available across both parties.
The first priority of the MoU is to verify compliancy between GlobalPlatforms technology and the EPC use cases. Focus will also be placed on the capabilities of the GlobalPlatform Messaging Specification to standardize communication between the different players in the mobile proximity payments ecosystem such as banks, trusted service managers and mobile network operators. The second objective is to further analyse a possible co-operation on compliance and certification of the secure element that hosts the mobile payment application(s).
GlobalPlatform is committed to developing enhanced specifications that will offer many benefits to the mobile community, says Sebastien Tormos, chairman at GlobalPlatform and director of Marketing at Datacard Group. As part of this we recently released a white paper which outlines how a scalable and sustainable mobile contactless ecosystem can best be realized by standardizing how organisations delivering a solution to market interact, facilitating new opportunities for existing deployments and avoiding proprietary solutions.
Collaboration across industry associations is key to establishing such a usable and secure infrastructure, and we are therefore delighted to formally acknowledge our relationship with the EPC. We look forward to an ongoing, productive alliance.
We have now created and approved an EPC-Roadmap for mobile payments services such as SEPA contactless card proximity payments and SEPA remote payments, says Dag-Inge Flatraaker, the chairman of EPC M-Channel Group. We clearly see the importance of working together with GlobalPlatform in the contactless domain in order to facilitate the implementation of our Roadmap, foster interoperability and contribute to a cohesive ecosystem that leverages the SEPA infrastructure implemented by the European banking industry.
L.D.