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News Desk
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O2 & Venyon In London NFC Trial
O2 recently announced a large scale mobile NFC trial - the O2 Wallet - which focuses on consumer attractiveness and behaviour. The trial, which involved over 500 trialists taken from the O2 customer base, took place across selected sites in London and will last for 6 months until the end of May 2008. The Nokia 6131 NFC mobile handsets used in the trial incorporate a number of NFC-enabled applications including the Oyster technology, delivered by TranSys for Transport for London, allowing trialists to use their mobile handset to travel across London. 225 handsets also contain a pre-agreed credit from Barclaycard Visa, enabling payWave contactless payments in London by just touching the handset in front of the reader.
Venyon provides the OTA services for the trial, including the OTA download and personalisation of the Barclaycard Visa payment application, and OTA download and configuration of the corresponding user interface application, namely Visa Mobile Application, to the NFC handsets used in the trial. Venyon also provides OTA application lifecycle management services to the trial, which enable O2 and Barclaycard to lock, unlock and delete the already provisioned payment applications residing on the mobile handsets. Additionally, O2 and Barclaycard have an online access to the up-to-date information on issued applications per consumer participating in the NFC trial.
Venyon provides its OTA services to the O2 Wallet from its secure data centre in Munich, Germany. For secure handling of the payment card data, Venyon co-operated with G+D, who provided the complete data generation for the Barclaycard payment application, ie. the key management and data preparation services.
The purpose of the trial is to evaluate the user experience, behaviour and acceptance of NFC-based mobile applications. O2 concentrates on understanding consumer attitudes towards using this kind of emerging technology and whether consumers feel safe and confident using their handset for payment and transportation services.
Cath Keers, Customer Director, O2 UK said, “This trial provides insights which will prove crucial in getting the customer experience right as we bring NFC on mobile to market. But the trial is just the start of this journey. While we believe that NFC technology is going to fundamentally change the way people use their mobile phones, we will need the whole ecosystem to come together for this to work, which means mobile operators, banks and retailers all need to work together to fulfill a shared vision. If we get this right we can place the UK at the forefront of technology innovation.”
 OTA provisioning of NFC applications is an essential enabler for wide-scale NFC deployment, as consumers would expect to be able to apply for and download NFC applications directly to their NFC-enabled mobile phone whenever new NFC applications are launched to the market. Venyon OTA services make it possible for service providers such as banks, transport operators and retailers to provision applications to their customers time and place independently and also securely.
“NFC-enabled mobile services have tremendous potential and the trial of the O2 Wallet is a spearheading project in testing the true multiapplication environment of mobile NFC services,” said Lauri Pesonen, CEO, Venyon. “OTA management of NFC applications is a must for commercial NFC deployment and this trial is an ideal venue to further verify these services in co-operation with O2 and other stakeholders in the mobile NFC ecosystem,” added Lauri.
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Composed: 21-Oct-2008 | Modified: 01-Mar-2009
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