Visa, iPhone, NFC & You
You've probably heard the rumours that next iPhone is getting a thing called NFC. You've also probably read about Visa doing some funky trials with "PayWave" and iPhones. And you also probably have a credit card which supports PayWave. Unfortunately, most of it is a bunch of hot air, but in the coming months, things are set to get much more serious. Aficionados of slim wallets will be pleased. Simply put, in the very near future, you'll be able to use your mobile phone to pay for small items, really quickly. How does this work? Is it voodoo magic? Can someone get hold of my phone and buy really embarrassing things that puts me on an ASIO watch list?
Let's look at the first bit of the puzzle - credit cards, money transactions and financial institutions. Right now, if you want to buy something at the shops, you either have to use cash, or some sort of card, be it EFTPOS or a Visa, Mastercard or American Express branded card. Despite the ease of using a traditional card (insert card into terminal, select account, enter PIN, press Enter), it's the slowest way of making a transaction, plus it unfortunately trips up some of the less technological savvy amongst us. I know I'm not the only one who becomes irrationally violent when someone (typically an old person or bogan mum) takes eons to swipe her credit card, inserting it the wrong way, unsure of which account to select and then entering the wrong PIN.
Using modern technology, the boffins at Visa & MasterCard devised a "contact-less payment system", in order to simplify and speed up the card using process. Why did they do this? Surely what we have now is fine? Well Visa and MasterCard hope that if the barrier to entry of their product (i.e: make it fast and easy) is low, it can replace the current product leader (cash) for the area of the market they don't own - small and quick transactions. Paying for things like fast food, groceries or petrol are generally done with cash as they're small amounts and people are in a hurry. Visa and MasterCard get a slice of the action every time you use your card, so naturally, they want a cut of these small transactions as well. They've already sewn up the bigger end of the market, so they need somewhere else to generate billions of dollars of profit. As little cogs in the financial transaction machine, we benefit from Visa and MasterCard's efforts to make money every time money changes hands, in that we can complete a small financial transaction in under 10 seconds without having to lug cash, or for the dumber people, remember how to use an EFTPOS terminal.
MasterCard developed PayPass and Visa developed PayWave. Very similar technologies, which at first, were incompatible. So when this technology was first trialled, you had to find a merchant (credit card speak for "shop") that had a PayPass, or PayWave terminal (credit card speak for "card reading machine thing"), depending on your card. Luckily for us, they both realised having competing standards was dumb and get in the way of them collecting a few cents each time you swipe. Out of that epiphany, EMV (Europay, MasterCard Visa) was born. It's a set of standards that makes sure all contact-less (and contact cards) operate in the same fashion and are cross-compatible. So now, PayPass and PayWave are pretty much just marketing terms meaning "contact-less".
At the moment, most Australian banks are issuing Visa and MasterCard credit & debit cards with this contact-less technology in them. More and more merchants are getting contact-less card readers too. Woolworths just announced they're rolling them out in all their stores too. Within the next 3 to 5 years, contact-less card readers will be everywhere.
The way contactless payments work currently is pretty simple. You go to buy something (under $100), take your wallet or purse out, when the terminal says "insert card", just tap your wallet or purse on the terminal and you're done. If you have two contactless cards (e.g: a NAB Visa and a Commonwealth Visa) you need to take the card out of your wallet. The technology doesn't allow multiple cards to be read at once. If you're buying something over $100, you just tap the card and then enter your PIN (or sign). Easy.
There are detailed FAQs about the technology on MasterCard's and Visa's websites. It explains all the details of how they work, what sort of limits there are and put to bed any security fears. This is one boogey-man people fear when using contact-less and PIN-less payments. Seeing as there's no PIN to keep secret, what's stopping someone just taking your card and going on a shopping spree? First of all, you can only do $100 or less without a PIN. Visa and your bank have good insurance. If you say you didn't do those sub-$100 transactions, chances are they'll return your money with little fuss. Giving people peace of mind and using their cards without hesitation is worth way more to them than whatever it would cost in refunds and loss of trust.
Why did I bother explaining all that? What's it got to do with the iPhone and NFC? Because what happens now with your credit card using PayWave/PayPass, is the exact same thing you'll be doing with your iPhone when it gains an NFC chip. What's NFC? NFC stands for Near Field Communications. It's a very broad term given to technologies that transmit data, wirelessly, within a short range. Wikipedia has more info than you could ever want about it.
Placing an NFC chip into a mobile device gives the device the ability to communicate with all the target devices out there. A credit card terminal is just one of the things an NFC enabled device can do. Normally an NFC device would be quite dumb and only do a single specific thing (e.g: a plastic card that requires no power). But thanks to the magic of software and apps, programs can be developed to give the mobile device the ability to communicate to any NFC target that you write an app for. It's like having a Swiss army-knife. Just without any sharp stuff. Or a toothpick. Or that nail file that's always totally useless.
Visa and MasterCard (mainly Visa), have been busy getting a way to ride on the iPhone bandwagon, by applying their existing technology to the iPhone and taking advantage of the iPhone's unique features, such as geo-location, cameras and touch screens. Their aim is to make paying for stuff really easy, so you buy more stuff using your Visa account and therefore, making Visa more money.
As of May 2011, there's been a lot of trials and PR-type guff as to what Visa will actually do and how NFC on the iPhone and smartphones in general will enable mobile payments. A year ago, in May 2010, Visa launched a US trial to bring PayWave to the iPhone 3G. It was a case, that had a MicroSD card in it, which houses the NFC gear to communicate with the terminals. It was accompanied by an app made by Visa, which communicated with the SD card in the case and enabled it to act just like a PayWave credit card. I assume that the participants had existing Visa accounts and the app simply cloned their existing cards. Very little detail was given about how the app worked and where the money for it came from. Overall though, it was quite clunky as you had to have the app open (multi-tasking didn't exist) to pay, plus you needed to have that rather ugly case. If you have a phone with a MicroSD card slot though, it worked pretty well. Following that, in October 2011, Visa worked with some public transport operators in New York and New Jersey to trial using PayWave on a mobile to augment their ticketing systems. That was one of the things that intrigued me most and NFC and PayWave, because as a Melbournian, I've experienced Myki and wish it worked like that. In Australia, the ANZ bank just completed a 4-week trial of the same ancient system in April 2011. That's the state of contact-less transactions with your mobile right now. Crappy and kinda lame.
In the next few months however, things will improve immensely. In the UK, it already has. Barclaycard & Orange have released a crappy phone called the Samsung Tocco Quick Tap and it's sole selling point is that it can do contact-less payments. The phone itself is uninteresting, but it's the first publicly available contact-less mobile payment system outside of Japan, that doesn't suck. What Orange and Barclaycard have done, is made an app for the phone which acts as a pre-paid credit card. You simply add money into your Quick Tap account and that money is available to use anywhere that accepts PayWave/PayPass. So while it's not an actual credit card, and doesn't interface directly with your bank account like a debit card, it's a glimpse into what the banks have planned.
Visa recently put out a press release and fluffy video outlining what they see the future of mobile payments becoming. There's so many buzz-words, it will fry your brain, so I'll break it down for ya. Visa want to make a "digital wallet" which is an app that sits on your computer and smartphone and links to all your money pots (PayPal, your bank accounts, your credit account) and allows you to pay online by entering a username & password, which provides the merchant with all your details, so you don't need to fill it in each time you buy online. This same username and password is used to log into a Visa app on your iPhone, allowing you to configure how you want to pay for stuff person to person (e.g: you owe your mate $20 for lunch) or for a merchant (e.g: buying a can of Coke at a vending machine, or a pair of Dunlop KT26s from Big W, or a new MacBook from Apple). That same app can even give you discounts and special offers, using the GPS feature, or a Foursquare style frequent customer feature.
How does that work in practice? We don't know quite yet as it's not out, but it's not hard to hypothesise how it would all go down. Imagine you're at Woolworths, buying your groceries. You go to the self serve checkout, scan all your goods and bag them. When it's time to pay, all you do is get your iPhone out of your pocket, hover it over the payment terminal, take your stuff and leave. Only shoplifting would be easier.
On your iPhone 4S+ XP or whatever Apple call the next iPhone, there's a Visa app. It runs in the background, working with the new fancy NFC chip embedded in the iPhone, waiting for a ping from a target device (the payment terminal). When you tap your phone to the terminal, in the background the Visa app talks to the Woolworth's payment gateway, does all the usual credit card transaction stuff, just like a credit card would. The Visa app has preferences, in which you can set a default payment method. You can have it set to draw from your credit account by default, or your debit account (using your own money, just like EFTPOS or a Visa debit card now). If you want to change from your default payment type, you can launch the app and do a one-off account change. Because you're at Woolworths, your Everyday Rewards card is automatically processed, as Visa and Woolworths worked together to make sure their loyalty scheme (together with all the other loyalty schemes around) is enabled, preventing you from forgetting to scan by needing to dig that extra card out of your wallet, or leaving it at home. The receipt isn't printed out, as it's simply emailed to you. You can also instantly see how much money you have remaining in your account, by opening the app and seeing real-time transaction info.
The above isn't far fetched, the technology is there and Visa probably has everything ready to go. Google's Nexus S has an NFC chip in it and it's available now too. But there's no Visa app for Android that enables this. When it comes into the hands of consumers, is up to whenever Apple decide to release an iPhone with NFC. Visa and MasterCard can't wait.
