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Visa announces microSD payment for mobiles
Visa announces microSD payment for mobiles - Visa
Visa Europe has announced today the launch of In2Pay, a system which uses a microSD card inside a mobile phone to make transactions.
The contactless payment system uses near field communications (NFC) technology via a microSD card called In2Pay, developed by DeviceFidelity. Not many mobiles have NFC technology built-in, which would allow contactless mobile phone payments, but the majority of smartphones, iPhones excluded, include microSD slots.
“One of the key challenges to the success of mobile payments is the supply and availability of NFC handsets,” said Mary Carol Harris, Head of Mobile at Visa Europe. Until NFC comes as standard in the majority of handsets, said Carol Harris, working with companies like DeviceFidelity will make NFC more accessible and speed up progress in mobile payment.
The microSD card can also be used for storage, so mobile users will not have to choose between the functionality of NFC and the ability to store music and videos.
The In2Pay microSD card is based on the Secure Element industry standard and is EMV and Global Platform compliant. It supports Javacard, MiFare, and the Open Platform architecture to allow full integration with Trusted Service Managers and Wallet developers. The In2Pay APIs have been licensed out to several developers in efforts to create new mobile banking applications.
It is not clear just how secure the new technology is and how easily it could be abused. The fact that it can be stored within a mobile phone means that the loss or theft of your mobile means your bank account is also at risk, so we imagine a system for reporting such incidents in a similar manner to that of credit card loss or theft would be employed.
And what happens if your juice-hungry smartphone goes dead, as they tend to? Unless you find another device to use the microSD in you may not be able to make payments, unless you keep your old-fashioned credit card on hand as a backup, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a microSD payment card in the first place.
In2Pay is currently only available in Turkey, and only to BlackBerry owners who are also customers of Akbank, but Visa said it has plans to expand to other smartphones, including those by HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia and Motorola.
The iPhone won't get this technology because it does not support microSD cards, but DeviceFidelity was not content to ignore the large Apple market and made an In2Pay contacless case for iPhones in May.
It has not been confirmed, but Visa has suggested that this technology may be rolled out to other countries throughout Europe in the near future.