MasterCard Worldwide and mFoundry
The new application will be available sometime in 2012 initially to mFoundry’s financial-services clients and industry partners such as Fidelity Information Systems, or FIS; First Data Corp.; and Open Solutions Inc., according to Drew Sievers, mFoundry CEO. The partnership with mFoundry will enable MasterCard to build PayPass into traditional mobile-banking software for mFoundry’s 560 bank and credit-union clients.
MasterCard also is making an unspecified investment in mFoundry, and the two companies will offer their software to telecommunication providers.
“We’re very active in mobile contactless payments through the PayPass program, and we’ve worked with Google, telcos in Europe and Isis in the past,” says James Anderson, MasterCard group head, mobile payments. “This announcement is a continuation of our strategy to place PayPass in as many places as possible so consumers can access it to execute contactless payments on their mobile phone. One important way consumers will want access to that functionality is through their banks.”
Leveraging an application consumers already are using, such as mobile banking, should help spur mobile payment adoption, he believes.
“Banks are looking for this kind of integration of mobile banking and mobile payments,” Anderson says, noting smaller banks have struggled getting a foothold in contactless mobile payments.
In the mFoundry deal, MasterCard PayPass will use Near Field Communication technology to pass payment information wirelessly from phones containing an NFC chip and antenna to merchant terminals equipped with similar chips. Some 330,000 merchant terminals globally accept PayPass, which issuers also support with contactless cards and stickers that do not support the two-way communications NFC chips support. Powered by phones, NFC chips can hold and transfer merchant-loyalty points, for example, something contactless chips in cards and stickers cannot do.
Initially, the MasterCard/mFoundry application will work with NFC-equipped Google Inc. Android and Research in Motion Ltd. BlackBerry devices. When Apple Inc. provides NFC support in its iPhone, the new software will be compatible, Anderson says. Apple recently received various NFC patents (
The new app will provide a seamless banking and payment experience, says Sievers. Consumers will be able to provision a card and validate who they are through the software. “You’ll have all the account information you’d expect with mobile banking–your account balance, your transaction histories, perhaps rewards and loyalty summaries, and the ability to pay bills,” he says.
MasterCard will provision the cards with its Mobile Over-the-Air Provisioning Service and provide any needed application programming interfaces. For those who choose not to use its provisioning service, MasterCard will come up with an alternative, Anderson says. Issuers will authenticate the payment transactions.
MasterCard also is working with other partners to provide mobile payments, including Google, Sprint and Isis.
The card brand is agnostic about the kind of hardware used for the secure element in mobile devices that stores account information, Anderson says. “We’ve launched programs on the SIM card in the [United Kingdom]. We’ve also announced programs that run on embedded secure elements–for example what we’ve done with Google Wallet” (
MFoundry provided mobile-wallet technology to Sprint, Alltel and other carriers four years ago, at a time when relationships were adversarial, says Sievers. “Over the last four years, everyone has been tempered somewhat, and the concept of collaboration has become more important,” he says.
What do you think about this? Send us your feedback.
