By signing the MoU the two parties aim to promote the availability of interoperable and neutral technology that will support a flexible and sustainable mobile payments marketplace.
The formal liaison relationship between the EPC and GlobalPlatform will ensure that the mobile contactless technical specifications and use cases of each organisation are compatible and adhere to pre-defined common requirements for mobile payments. By synchronising their activity the organisations will minimise the duplication of effort, have access to member-only work priorities, and capitalise on the impressive wealth of market and technical expertise available across both parties.
Sebastien Tormos, GlobalPlatform chairman and director of marketing at Datacard Group, commented: “GlobalPlatform is committed to developing enhanced specifications that will offer many benefits to the mobile community. As part of this we recently released a white paper which outlines how a scalable and sustainable mobile contactless ecosystem can best be realised by standardising how organisations delivering a solution to market interact, facilitating new opportunities for existing deployments and avoiding proprietary solutions. Collaboration across industry associations is key to establishing such a usable and secure infrastructure, and we are therefore delighted to formally acknowledge our relationship with the EPC. We look forward to an ongoing, productive alliance.”
The first priority of the MoU is to verify compliancy between GlobalPlatform’s technology and the EPC use cases. Focus will also be placed on the capabilities of the GlobalPlatform Messaging Specification to standardise communication between the different players in the mobile proximity payments ecosystem such as banks, trusted service managers and mobile network operators. The second objective is to further analyse a possible co-operation on compliance and certification of the secure element that hosts the mobile payment applications.