PARTNER NEWS: South Korean smart card provider Kona has unveiled the Kona Payment platform, a customizable, end-to-end solution for card issuers that supports tokenization, physical cards, mobile payments via both HCE and SIM-based secure elements, and wearable devices.

“This HCE, cloud-based solution supports in-store, in-app and online payments by digitized cards,” the company says. “It supports two kinds of payment methods — a mobile HCE card and the plastic card called the Kona Pay card. It supports four types of secure element form factors — physical cards, wearable devices, uSIMs and HCE.

“When you make payments on your mobile phone, just simply tap your Kona Pay card onto your phone or use the mobile HCE card to complete your payment. Unlike other solutions, this HCE-based solution has all required modules for end-to-end solution to complete a mobile-based EMV transaction securely. As a new feature, Kona is bringing tokenization solutions for physical cards also.”

“It’s a product for issuers,” Minaoar Hossain Tanzil, CIO and head of solution business at Kona, told NFC World in an interview at Money20/20. “It’s an enablement platform for issuers to provide their own branded wallets with digitization and tokenization.

“We have planned to build our own data centre so that issuers can get the service as a hosted model and also they can have full control of it. We have spoken to issuers who prefer to have that complete set of servers into their premises, so we are also going to do that. We are giving you the mobile SDKs so that you can customise it into your own wallet — that is the ultimate freedom issuers have.”

Wearable payments

“We are also trying to work with wearable manufacturers so that they can have a secure element in their wearable and whenever a particular issuer is offering their product, the users can make payments,” Tanzil added.

“We have been working with issuers for the last 17 years in more than 60 countries. We know their taste. We know how and what they want. We think this is our core strength.

“Our Kona Payment platform is the only one which services cards to wearables in a single platform — that is the unique thing we have. We think the capacity of customising wearables is a unique feature to us.”

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