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PARIS—Gemalto has introduced a payment system that would enable train riders in France to purchase and store ticket information using their mobile phones. The scheme, demonstrated this week at the Cartes & Identification trade show here, would apply to tickets for rides on the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer français, the French national railway better known as SNCF. The railway operates more than 10,000 trains each day. Riders would use mobile phones equipped with Near Field Communication technology to buy tickets through the railway's Web site, according to the French card vendor. Travelers with prepaid tickets could use the service to check how much value they have remaining. The ticket information would be stored in the SIM cards inside the mobile phones, Remy Belloir, order engineering director for the vendor's Europe/Middle East/Asia region, told CardLine Global. The NFC chip would connect to the SIM inside the mobile phone, he said. Riders could choose destinations from a drop-down menu on the phone, Belloir added, showing the process on a handset from Finland-based Nokia Corp. In a statement, the card vendor said SNCF "is considering offering a bundle of transport-related services on NFC-enabled phones, including … real-time access to travel news." For that to happen, though, handset makers such as Nokia would have to make available significant amounts of NFC-enabled mobile phones to consumers. The lack of such handsets remains one of the main reasons NFC schemes have yet to advance from testing throughout the world to large rollouts for such tasks as transit-fare payments and retail purchases. Observers at Cartes predict NFC rollouts within the next 12 to 18 months, but earlier predictions for the short-range contactless payment and downloading technology proved optimistic. Gemalto expects to test the NFC service for the French railway in 2010, Belloir said.
