Norwegian telecommunications provider Telenor (News - Alert), in partnership with DNB, Norway's largest financial services group, announced it will launch Norway’s first commercial Near Field Communications (NFC) project, which aims to give everyone in Norway the opportunity to make payment using NFC technology.
When the service is launched, users will be able to pay any payment terminal accepting contactless Visa transactions.
The NFC project follows the success of the Tap2Pay pilot project launched by Telenor in Oslo in 2011.
For this project, Telenor has partnered with Munich-based technology group Giesecke & Devrient (G&D), which will provide the OTA NFC solution, the SmartTrust (News - Alert) NFC Enabler, bringing new business opportunities within Telenor’s reach, the company said.
G&D’s OTA NFC solution will support remote management of the secure element in mobile phones to enable contactless payment as well as the NFC SIM cards. It enables access to the SIM card, initial personalization of the security domain, and management of access authorizations for service providers and their applications.
Telenor will be upgrading G&D’s SmartTrust DPTM platform, which it was using for Over-the-Air (OTA) management of SIM cards along their entire lifecycle. The telco will also implement “Remote Application Management over HTTP” standard to ensure faster and more reliable connections for TSM transactions than have generally been possible before.
In addition, G&D is supplying Telenor with the multi-application NFC SIM cards for the project.
With all these capabilities, Telenor can enable any service provider to introduce further NFC applications, such as public transport tickets, Telenor said.
“The commercial launch of NFC is an important step towards making payment via mobile phone an everyday reality in Norway and throughout Scandinavia,” said Florian Reithmeier, head of Global Marketing and Sales Mobile Security at Giesecke & Devrient (News - Alert).
“In expanding the scope of our longstanding partnership, Telenor is opting for a secure, reliable, and future-proof solution that enables rapid OTA transactions in the NFC ecosystem and leads to high levels of customer satisfaction,” Reithmeier added.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson