How Pay-Buy-Mobile Works
Near Field Communications technology (NFC) is at the heart of Pay-Buy-Mobile. Handsets equipped with an NFC chip can communicate with existing contactless payment systems. When passed close to the reader, data can be exchanged between the handset and the point of sale device. This facility can be used to deliver a wide range of secure, interoperable and transparent services, such as credit and debit payments.
Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC)
A core element of GSM mobile phones is the UICC, often referred to as the “SIM card”. The UICC is where the payment application (and any other NFC service applications) can be stored. The NFC applications in the UICC can communicate to the NFC chip via the Single Wire Protocol (SWP) interface. The 52 mobile operators involved in the PBM project all support the use of the SWP as a standard to link the UICC with the phone’s NFC chip.
SWP standard can be downloaded from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) website.
Secure Environment
To enable the service, the credit card application is downloaded into the secure environment of the UICC that is embedded in the phone.
More than one credit or debit card can be stored in the same UICC, increasing the convenience of PBM to the consumer. In use, data transferred by NFC from the handset to the reader is communicated to financial organisations using the same secure process as used for conventional credit or debit card transactions.
