Tag: nfc mobile wallet

The mobile payments provider has announced its intentions to include near field communication.

Cellum, a mobile wallet provider from Europe, has announced that NFC technology is on its way to its services. Currently, its mobile payments services are based on Host Card Emulation technology. However, NFC is becoming increasingly commonplace in this market and a company press release revealed they’re joining in.

The company has successfully applied near field communication technology to services in the past.

According to Zoltán Ács, the Cellum director of research and development, “Until recently, Cellum focused on remote payments, though the company is no stranger to NFC, as it has had a number of successful implementations based on the technology in the past.” That said, Ács pointed out that when they had previously used NFC technology, the market hadn’t been “ready for it.”

Cellum believes the market has since evolved and is ready to adopt NFC technology based solutions.

He explained that by implementing NFC based mobile wallets, it will help to better meet a rising demand for secure, rapid and easy to use payment solutions. Cellum has become an official MasterCard Digital Vendor Partner through the Hungarian support of the launch of MasterCard MasterPass.

Cellum provides banks and telcos with mobile wallet services that are MasterPass enabled. They also provider merchants with integration services that use its platform which is compliant with PCI DDS.

As MasterCard gets itself ready for its upcoming launch of contactless HCE based payments through its MasterPass, Cellum will offer its own partners the same functionality. Cellum COO, Ábel Garamhegyi, explained that the company has been using a white label model that included mobile wallet tech for several years. Garamhegyi went on to state that they have used it to established solid partnerships in Europe right through a good portion of the Asian market. He added that it gives the company pride to be “able to serve the diverse needs of our various clients and markets.”

The introduction of NFC technology will only expand on this capability as they broaden their reach as an official Digital Vendor Partner of MasterCard. This will bring together the one-touch PayPass experience with the online MasterPass convenience, all in a single branded app, said Garamhegyi.

The growth of the use of this tech has been quite slow but people are adopting near field communication.

It has been slightly over one year since mobile payments companies, such as banks and network operators, had been doing everything they could to make sure that they had worked NFC technology into their systems so that they would be able to keep up with what they felt was an overwhelmingly large opportunity as enabled devices would flood the marketplace.

They were under the impression that Apple would soon be releasing an enabled device.

Since that time, several Apple devices have been launched and not one of them has included the NFC technology that had been anticipated. Though the preparations for near field communications had skyrocketed, and the tech had been worked into everything from mobile wallets to marketing, the growth of the penetration of the actual devices occurred much more slowly than anticipated.

iPhones still do not feature NFC technology among their options and companies have had to look to other avenues.

Google Wallet, Isis, and even MasterCard have all recently announced that although they have not abandoned their use of NFC technology, they are implementing additional methods in order to make sure that their services would be accessible by a larger number of consumers. For the most part, this has meant that QR codes – the two dimensional barcodes that had once been believed to have limited days left because of the upcoming popularity of near field communication tech – have been added to these massive systems.

That said, it appears that all is not lost for NFC technology. The majority of the latest Android smartphones do contain these chips and as they start to spread throughout the world – and dominate the shipments of smartphones on a global scale – it has meant that systems relating to this tech are starting to launch. Though they haven’t taken off at the rate that had been initially expected, they are now experiencing a healthy, moderate growth.

In fact, according to Strategy Analytics market research, though the expectations for the demand for NFC technology have been reduced, it is still estimated that by the end of 2017, payments using this tech will have reached $48 billion.