 |
| "Touch'n pay" demonstrates the usage of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology for Self Service Shopping |
By the joint project touch'n pay, operated by NEXPERTS, e24 and other industrial partners plus the University of Applied Science from Northwest Switzerland, from December 2009 customers can shop for goods and services by a simple touch with their NFC enabled mobile phone during a several month field trial.
80 customers from the Zurich region will be equipped with an NFC enabled mobile phone that eases the shopping process in farmer shops significantly. As these self marketing farmers do not have a usual Point of Sale infrastructure and are operated without assisting personal in the shop, the NFC mobile phone becomes the electronic shopping basket, cash point and access key. The shopper simply touches the price tag, on which an NFC tags stores the item and price information. A shopping basket application on the mobile phone sums up all articles and by a touch to the "checkout" tag the electronic payment process will be initiated.
Furthermore the NFC enabled customers can access to the farmer's shop around the clock by opening the door-lock cylinder with a touch by their mobile phone. The project has been initiated by NEXPERTS GmbH from Hagenberg, Austria together with e24 AG from Zurich, Switzerland. It is supported by SIX Multi Solutions AG, the provider of the secure payment service Mobile Buy, which links mobile-phone purchases to Visa and MasterCard credit cards, Winter AG and Alliera AG. LEGIC provided the contactless smart card technology and their partner SEA the NFC enabled door lock cylinders. The Mobile Lab from advertising agency Transformer supports the end-user communication for the project.
The backend systems with deposited means of payment like PostFinance, Visa or MasterCard is operated by e24. NEXPERTS developed all applications on the mobile phone (Java MIDlet and Secure Element Applet), Winter AG from Unterschleissheim near Munich provides the OTA (over-the-air) provisioning and personalisation services. SMS services are initiated by Alliera's Communication Suite.
All experiences and results from the project will be collected and analyzed by the University of Applied Sciences from Northwest Switzerland to retrieve important information for a later real operation. By the «touch‘n pay» Initiative the project partners plan to stimulate the Swiss industry for acting in the area of NFC deployments.
"NFC Users are an important target group for contactless payment and our customers of tomorrow. To experience how our products are used is of great interest for us to optimise our services better for the customer needs" says Alexander Schümperli, CEO, e24 AG.
Kurt Schmid, CEO from NEXPERTS adds: "For NEXPERTS as expert in the area of NFC solutions this project is extremely interesting and trendsetting. In a few years contactless payment will be a commodity. The experience gathered from this project will us help to streamline the user interfaces for a Mobile Wallet."
"End Users can not only use the NFC phone for cashless self service shopping but also as door key, ticket or identity credential for memberships. The new technology opens various possibilities to ease the daily life. This project will benefit understanding this vision", adds Urs Andrin Lampe, Vice President Product Marketing & New Business, LEGIC.
