France set for national NFC rollout

Telcos France Telecom-Orange, SFR, along with Bouygues Telecom, and banks BNP Paribas and Crédit Mutuel-CIC plan to move their NFC projects from a few local deployments to the national stage this year.

French mobile operators, banks and vendors say they are finally ready for a nationwide launch of NFC payments this year, a move that follows years of preparations.

Among the issues the players have had to deal with along the way have been interoperability doubts that persisted at least into the spring of this year – reports Dan Balaban.

The operators have been seeding the market with NFC phones and, to a lesser extent, NFC SIM cards. About 40 NFC models have been available in mobile shops that can work with the French “Cityzi” NFC SIM cards and more than 3.5 million of the phones have been sold to date.

Orange and, more recently, SFR, say they have also been issuing NFC SIM cards to new subscribers and by the end of the year, Bouygues and a mobile virtual network operator are expected to begin issuing the standard SWP-SIMs.

BNP Paribas and Crédit Mutuel-CIC are expected to begin signing up customers for their mobile-payment services at branches in various parts of the country this fall, though nationwide promotion might not start later in the year or early next year. Two other large French banks, Société Générale and La Banque Postale, are expected to follow with their own NFC payment launches.

And since last year, all new point-of-sale terminals have come with contactless readers, though many are not yet activated. But by the end of 2013, French banks estimate there will be around 200,000 active terminals that accept Visa payWave and MasterCard PayPass. Some estimates place the forecast at 300,000.

NFC-enabled transit and other local services might launch in a few more cities, with help from government funding, but most transit ticketing commercial projects won’t start until next year, including a hoped-for launch of mobile NFC ticketing in the Paris region. The focus for this year for the national rollout is on payment.

Interoperability Issues

But despite France’s pioneering role in setting global interoperability standards for NFC and the launch of its groundbreaking multi-operator, multivendor trial in May of 2010 in the southern French city of Nice, doubts have persisted even into this spring about whether French TSM platforms and SIM cards from different vendors could work together.

NFC Times has learned that the major French telcos and banks, through their respective associations, AFSCM and AEPM, sought assurances from the two major French vendors supplying technology for the national launch, Gemalto and Oberthur Technologies. The vendors were persuaded by the telco and banking group members in April to jointly sign a letter committing that their technologies would be interoperable.

The operators and banks wanted to know that the NFC SIM cards from one vendor would work with the competitor’s TSM platform, and vice versa, said sources. There were also questions about whether a service provider TSM hired by a bank would communicate well with the TSM managing the SIM cards for a mobile operator–if those two TSM platforms come from different vendors.

Representatives of French mobile operators, banks and vendors said that they are now confident that the TSMs and SIMs will be interoperable for the national rollout. They add that among the reasons for the concerns were that banks had asked for more control over how their applications are managed on operator SIM cards. This greater control for banks and their TSMs was not available as a feature on SIMs used in the earlier NFC trials. Supporting the feature required more development work.

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