AFSCM, the French contactless association, along with Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, chose Oberthur Technologies to deploy and manage a single hub for NFC-based services.

The announcement notes that 11.5 million users in France (June 2016 figure) now own a NFC-based smartphone, offering a ready-made market. The hub approach is judged the most efficient way to deploy a large number of new NFC-based services at speed.

All new NFC services will be provided through a single interface deployed and managed by Oberthur. The multi-tenant architecture of the firm’s deployment is claimed to allow a sharing of resources and connections to service providers between the three mobile operators. In addition, the set up enables quick onboarding of new operators or MVNOs. Iliad is the only one of the country’s operators not currently involved.

“AFSCM has adopted a very pragmatic approach in order to simplify the ecosystem: a single and consistent architecture shared by all MNOs to optimise the go-to-market for NFC services,” said Pierre Barrial, managing director of the mobile networks operators business at Oberthur.