Orange UK customers will be able to pay for items up to £15 without entering a PIN, Orange is offering the service on a Samsung Tocco Quick Tap handset available on Pay As You Go for £59.99, and from free on Pay Monthly contracts from £10 per month on 24 month contracts. Orange has said that it wants half of the smartphones it sells to be NFC-enabled. Clearly this launch has come too early to offer that sort of device diversity.
Gemalto is acting as the Trusted Service Manager, which includes the supply of NFC-enabled SIMs, containing the secure element, to Orange.
Orange said the NFC phones will work at 50,000 stores, mainly at branches of Pret a Manger, EAT, Little Chef, Subway, Wilkinson and McDonalds that already have contactless payments terminals. The company said 12.9 million contactless credit and debit cards are already in circulation, of which over 11.4m have been issued by Barclaycard.
The secure element managed by Gemalto’s TSM service is located on the handset’s SIM card, silicon controlled exclusively by the mobile operator. This is the model mobile operators prefer. It is also one that will be increasingly challenged as secure elements proliferate in individual handsets – one in the SIM, one in the embedded NFC chipset, another in a removable microSD card, and even a secure element built into the smartphone’s main processor. No end of confusion to come!
For more on the O2 and Orange announcements: http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news/news-analysis/8773-orange-and-o2-announce-mobile-money-details