NFC has been boosted after the company responsible for running London’s underground Tube network said it was testing the technology to accept journey payment via mobile phone.
Transport for London (TfL) is currently testing how contactless cards could work on its Tube network. Since London’s buses started accepting contactless card payment in December 2012, more than 11.5 million journeys have been taken by using this payment option.
The pilot is being tested by TfL staff and members of the public, with a hard launch expected to take place later in the year. The pilot does not currently accept smartphone payments via NFC but TfL’s director of customer experience said that was likely to change in the future.
Shashi Verma said: “We are continuing to modernise all our transport services to make it easier for customers to do business with us. The upgrade to our readers to accept contactless payment cards also makes them capable of accepting suitable payment applications on mobile phones.
“In principle, mobile phones with a Visa, Mastercard or AMEX payment application could be accepted on our services. At this stage, mobile phones with pre-paid cards will not be accepted. We are testing to see how the devices perform on the system and welcome any innovations which improve the services and choices we are able to offer customers.”
EE is currently the only UK operator to offer a mobie payments scheme, through its Cash on Tap proposition. Vodafone is expected to follow suit later this year, after its NFC wallet first went live in Spain in late 2013. O2 has got back to the drawing board after closing its O2 Wallet.
While NFC has been seen as the likeliest method of making mobile payments, it has been very slow to catch on. Earlier this month, Motorola Solutions claimed manufacturers were increasingly sceptical about the merits of the technology. Recent developments in Host Card Emulation technology, which stores the card information in the cloud instead of the device’s secure element, have been seen as potentially solving issues around NFC adoption.
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