LIVE FROM MOBILE ASIA EXPO 2014: Anne Bouverot, Director General of the GSMA, talked up progress around the association’s four key areas of focus: Personal Data, Connected Living, Digital Commerce, and Network 2020.

News from its Personal Data initiative focused on a beta trial by Axiata and Mobitel that will offer ‘Mobile Connect’ services to users in Sri Lanka. The Personal Data initiative is designed to enable individuals to use their mobile number (contained in the SIM card) to authenticate themselves securely across a range of devices, meaning consumers will no longer need to create and manage multiple user names and passwords for online services.

The Sri Lankan service will be launched in conjunction with select local online service providers including Kapruka, MyDeal and WoW and will be made available to participating subscribers by the end of June.

In addition, Etisalat Group is expected to launch Mobile Connect services in the third quarter of 2014, while Orange intends to provide Mobile Connect-based solutions across Europe, and Africa and the Middle East by 2015. Ooredoo is also aiming to provide similar services in South East Asia in the same timeframe.

Bouverot also announced that SIM technology providers Gemalto, Giesecke & Devrient, Morpho, Oberthur Technologies and VALID are working with the GSMA and mobile operators to develop authentication applets to accelerate the widespread deployment of Mobile Connect services.

The GSMA’s Connected Living programme aims to enable a range of new mobile connected devices and services in healthcare, automotive, utilities and education. Bouverot cited a GSMA statement earlier this week announcing that the M2M market is growing rapidly, with connections forecast to reach a quarter of a billion this year (2.8 per cent of all global mobile connections). “China is at the forefront of this growth and is now the world’s largest M2M market with 50 million connections, larger than the US and Japan combined,” commented Bouverot.

In the area of Digital Commerce, the GSMA boss said the association is working with mobile operators to develop mobile wallets that can aggregate and manage multiple digital commerce services such as payment cards, tickets, loyalty cards, receipts and vouchers.

To that end, Bouverot highlighted an announcement on a report by Consult Hyperion that evaluated SIM-based and Host Card Emulation (HCE) approaches for NFC payments. “There is a lot of interest around this and while the debate will continue, SIM-based NFC offers several advantages,” claimed Bouverot. “It’s being deployed around the world and we’re focused on driving further adoption.”

Bouverot also touted the GSMA’s progress with mobile money interoperability, citing commercial success between operator services in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Finally, Bouverot noted that operators are investing in new network functionalities and the delivery of interoperable native IP services such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE). “LTE is gaining pace. At the end of 2013 LTE connections stood at 200 million and is set to grow to 2.6 billion by the end of 2020; more than a quarter of all mobile connections worldwide,” said Bouverot. And the GSMA head claims Asia is taking a leading role: “South Korea is the world’s most advanced 4G market with 100 per cent of its population covered by 4G. China is also growing rapidly and is expected to have 900 million 4G connections by the end of 2020.”