LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE ASIA EXPO 2013: Several countries across Asia Pacific have already deployed contactless point-of-sale terminals so paving the way for NFC-based services, Niki Manby, head of emerging products, Asia Pacific, Central Europe, Middle East & Africa – Visa, told Mobile World Live.

Manby said contactless infrastructure can also be leveraged for NFC-based services.
“Several countries across Asia Pacific have widely adopted contactless point of sales terminals including Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, South Korea and Taiwan, so we expect these markets to be the first to launch large scale commercial mobile NFC services,” she stated.

In addition, the same markets also have penetration by Samsung handsets. In future many of the vendor’s devices, including the Galaxy S4, will come pre-loaded with the Visa payWave payment app, which enables financial institutions to more easily provision Samsung handsets with Visa accounts. The two companies struck an agreement to preload the app on handsets at this year’s GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Manby says there are three major components of NFC implementation. They are merchants’ contactless terminals; contactless issuer programmes; and mobile NFC provisioning.

The first two categories are “fairly standard” across markets, she said. However, provisioning mobile NFC accounts varies.  Some pilot schemes are pre-provisioning accounts but this is not viable for large scale deployments. Others are focused on SIM-based account management, while others will use handset vendors to embed a secure element in their devices. And a range of trusted service managers (TSMs) are vying for card issuer and operator engagement to support their model.

“So while standards of payment transaction are well established, standards for provisioning are still under consideration in most markets,” said Manby.