DeviceFidelity signs up first licensees for its In2Pay NFC microSD solution

DeviceFidelity has signed up the first licensees for its microSD format NFC solution, UK mobile payments provider Monitise and US mobile solutions provider Ecrio, and has announced version 2 of its In2Pay product, adding support for EMV compliant payment applications and for Mifare ticketing applications.

In2Pay includes both an antenna and an industry standard dual interface contactless smart card chip that can be loaded with a certified payment or ticketing application, using standard bank card personalisation and card issuing systems, enabling banks and other service providers to offer NFC services to their customers with minimum amendments to their existing infrastructure.

Once an In2Pay microSD card has been personalised with a cardholder’s details it can be inserted into one end of a specially designed plastic ‘card’ which can then be distributed to customers using a standard bank card mailer.

When the customer receives his new device in the mail, he simply detaches the card from the carrier, removes the NFC microSD device from the card and inserts it into his mobile phone. Software then installs and a prompt appears on the phone’s screen instructing the customer to enter a password on the mobile phone’s keypad. Once that has been done, the customer’s phone is NFC-enabled for whatever applications the bank has chosen to install on the In2Pay device.

First announced in November 2009, last month Visa revealed it would be conducting field tests of In2Pay from the second quarter of 2010.

“The In2Pay microSD v2 is Trusted Service Manager (TSM) ready, allowing TSM client software on mobile devices to interact with the In2Pay Secure Element through a new Java based Application Programming Interface (In2Pay API),” DeviceFidelity explains. “The patented TSM ready architecture of the In2Pay v2 allows TSM providers to support the In2Pay solution without modifying the TSM server designed for embedded or SIM based NFC solutions.”

“We’ve seen an amazing response to our In2Pay solution from the NFC ecosystem players,” says Deepak Jain, president and CEO of DeviceFidelity. “By adding new features and opening the platform to developers, we are delivering on our promise of taking mobile contactless to a larger number of devices and consumers around the globe.”

“Monitise is delighted to add the payments capabilities delivered via the DeviceFidelity technologies to be made available to our growing list of Mobile Money financial institutions, to move us toward true, mobile-initiated payments,” adds Lisa Stanton, head of global alliances for Monitise.

“We are excited to be one the first companies to license the In2Pay API,” comments Nagesh Challa, CEO of Ecrio, whose investors include Visa and NTT Docomo. “We can now effectively make use of a large number of contactless enabled mobile devices for our applications.”

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