Mobile Payment Magazine

Wells Fargo to Conduct Mobile Payment Trial in San Francisco

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Using 200 of its San Francisco staff, the bank will test mobile-phone payments for six months—and may launch a commercial service soon after. Wells Fargo (WFC) is again trying to make mobile payments at restaurants and retailers mainstream, three years after an earlier attempt lost steam. Peter Ho, product manager of card services at the bank, led a test several years ago that let executives use a Nokia phone, rather than a debit or credit card, to pay for fast food and other items. While he liked the convenience, Wells Fargo didn’t end up offering the service to customers, partly because only the one handset was capable of transmitting payment information at the time.

This month, Ho gets another chance as the bank kicks off a mobile-payment trial with 200 employees in San Francisco using a technology that can be inserted into existing phones with microSD cards. To make payments at participating retailers, employees will simply open the Wells Fargo Mobile Banking app, select the pay-with-phone button. and wave the phone in front of special mobile-payment readers.

“We have made an investment in this technology, and we hope this investment pays off,” says Ho, who declined to give the amount of the investment in so-called near-field communications (NFC) technology that uses short-range wireless connections to transfer payment or other information between devices.

via BusinessWeek.

DeviceFidelity’s In2Pay Announced as Visa’s First Official Contactless Payment Solution – and It’s MicroSD

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DeviceFidelity In2Pay

Photo from DeviceFidelity

Following in the buzz from the recent Isis initiative announcement, Visa has announced the availability of mobile contactless payments enabled by DeviceFidelity’s In2Pay microSD solution.

In2Pay is the first mobile contactless payment solution included in the list of Visa compliant products available for potential commercial deployment by financial institutions in the U.S. and select markets. There are approximately 5 billion mobile handsets in market around the globe, and according to IDC3, smart phone shipments globally are expected to increase 24% in 2011, helping drive continued growth in more robust and powerful mobile devices that are capable of supporting contactless payment. [Read more…]

Tyfone Receives Patent for Mobile Wallet Technology

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Over the next two years, analysts forecast contactless payment transactions via MicroSD technology will be used by more than 20 million people in North America alone, at thousands of contactless payment terminals already in place. According to a Sept. 2009 forecast by Juniper Research, near-field communications (NFC) contactless payment global gross transaction value is expected to exceed $30 billion by 2012.

Tyfone  has recently been awarded a patent for its new mobile electronic wallet technology. The technology enables the use of a mobile phone having a memory card slot and a memory card compatible with the memory card slot to transmit transaction data to a reader device. The memory card includes circuitry used to produce a time-varying magnetic field that enables a contactless transaction. The circuitry used to produce a time-varying magnetic field may include smartcard circuitry.

Tyfone, based in Portland, OR and Bangalore, India, is a global provider of unified mobile money and secure transaction infrastructure for mobile banking, mobile identity management, and mobile contactless NFC payments

“Tyfone recognizes the value of this intellectual property and the hard work that it has taken to continue developing innovative solutions, confirmed by this patent issuance. This patent will uniquely enable solutions that will allow consumers to benefit from the convergence of money and mobility,” said Dr. Siva Narendra, chief technology officer at Tyfone. “Our innovations allow financial institutions to provide secure, convenient and holistic solutions, therefore enable a value driven user experience to multiple generations of consumers, whose needs and usage models differ widely. Tyfone’s neutral secure commerce solutions are easily implemented and scalable by financial institutions, merchants, account issuers, or network operators. Ensuring security and a positive consumer experience are our guiding principles.”

“As recent news from major financial, mobility and computing brands demonstrate, all the stakeholders in financial services and commerce are converging on mobile,” said Dr. Narendra. “The NFC and contactless market is heating up now more than ever as handset manufacturers, OS developers, network operators, payment card networks and financial institutions all race to secure a stake in this technology and its direction. Tyfone’s innovations include a secure end-to-end mobile money and transaction platform that also provides neutral contactless NFC solutions.

Unlike software-only technologies that refer to their application as an electronic wallet and are limited in functionality and security, Tyfone’s platform includes the SideTap™ neutral secure element — thereby creating a digital container and functionality, unavailable in software-only solutions, for securely storing content for a true electronic “wallet.” This solution enables any stakeholder to securely manage multiple consumer credit, debit, pre-paid, loyalty, identification, and transportation accounts for use in a wide range of payment and other secure transactions, while maintaining the storage capabilities of existing memory cards that consumers have grown accustomed to.

In the growing contactless payment marketplace, Tyfone’s patents, SideTap memory card product, and u4ia (pronounced euphoria) mobile money and secure transaction platform enable any commerce stakeholder to bring immediate scale by converting most existing handsets to be NFC ready.

Source: Tyfone