MeaWallet, the leading global provider of neutral mobile wallet solutions, welcomes the new Apple iPhone 6 with built-in NFC

Thanks to Apple, we firmly believe that the entire mobile payment market will grow much faster than earlier expected. NFC payments will finally be available across all smartphones. We expect large retailers will significantly accelerate their deployment of NFC terminals starting already in Q4 2014.

Oslo, Norway - September 10, 2011, In 2007 when Apple launched the first smartphone, existing NFC payment ecosystems were put on hold or “collapsed” totally. Nokia was the leading mobile handset manufacture at that point, and they invested heavily in NFC. We all know what happened with Nokia after the Apple smart phone entered the market.

9 out of 10 smartphone manufacturers now include NFC as standard. In 2013 more than 345 million smartphones were shipped with support for NFC. Apple will finally join the NFC party with “Apple Play” and NFC built into the new iPhone 6.

The late-2013 the adoption of host card emulation (HCE) by Google in the Android operating system (OS) v4.4 (KitKat), created a new market opportunity for solution providers and issuers. Now it became possible to implement and deploy NFC solutions on a large scale. KitKat removed both dependencies on the secure element (SE) and trusted service manager (TSM) infrastructure as well as the need to set commercial agreements with secure element issuers (SEIs). HCE support is currently available in the Android operating system (Android KitKat 4.4 and higher) and the BlackBerry operating system.

Apple has now added NFC technology into their new iPhone6, which means that NFC finally has become a true international standard in the market. Apple Pay is not based on HCE. Rather it is a solution based on an embedded secure element in the iPhone6. For practical purposes this is not important. In our opinion, as long as a Service provider can offer a common user experience to all their customers and across all smartphone platforms, the underlying technology becomes irrelevant.

Banking is at the highest risk of disruption on multiple fronts, and this market will change dramatically the next 3-to-5 years. In the US, one in three customers are open to switching banks. Statements such as “I don’t see the difference between my bank and all the others” are not uncommon. New players like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google or neutral mobile wallet providers like MeaWallet are all well positioned to capture a meaningful part of this market in the future. It’s all about customer-facing convenience and back-end security. For more information: www.millennialdisruptionindex.com/

The card schemes Visa, MasterCard and American Express, have all historically endorsed and supported NFC for mobile payments through support for Secure Element (SE) based solutions (be they embedded, SIM based or 3rd party SD card based). More recently they have endorsed Host Card Emulation (HCE) for payments. These same card schemes are now also endorsing Apple Pay, an NFC variant based on the embedded secure element architecture already seen previously in some Blackberry, Windows and Android devices.

MeaWallet is one of very few neutral mobile wallet providers that can offer one solution on all platforms. It is not only about payment, it’s about moving the whole content of your existing wallet into your mobile device(s).

For more information: www.meawallet.com