Standardizing the future of payments in an increasingly diversified world

Covershot: Standardizing the future of payments in an increasingly diversified worldThis 10-page paper examines the threats stemming from the increasing numbers and diversity of devices that can transact mobile payments and sets out how GlobalPlatform’s work on the standardisation and certification of secure components can mitigate these risks.

“As more services are delivered digitally, the volume and diversity of devices accessing these digital services is rapidly increasing,” says author Gil Bernabeu, the technical director at digital security association GlobalPlatform. “Fragmentation across different sectors poses a particular security challenge, and industry collaboration is key to solving it.”

The paper starts by examining how much fragmentation exists in the mobile payments ecosystem, before looking at the causes including device diversity, the emergence of wearables and the associated high rates of device turnover, and the emergence of new IoT-based devices such as connected cars and smart fridges.

It then examines the problems that diversity presents, including interoperability, security and reputational risk issues.

The paper then moves on to look at how standardisation and certification can address these issues, and how hardware and firmware-based secure components help by acting as an on-device trust anchor.

The paper goes on to outline GlobalPlatform’s role in defining the specifications and configurations that underpin the standardisation of these secure components and how they are securely managed throughout their lifecycle.

The author then turns to GlobalPlatform’s most significant ongoing initiatives, which include work on managing multiple contactless environments in a single NFC device and simplifying mobile ticketing in mass transportation — a notoriously fragmented market.

Finally the document looks at wearables, and particularly the work now under way to provide a standardized secure Bluetooth Low Energy link that can be used by these and other IoT devices to securely transact with other devices.

‘Standardizing the future of payments in an increasingly diversified world’ has been produced by GlobalPlatform and forms part of NFC World’s What’s New in Payments report.

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This 10-page paper is available free of charge to NFC World Knowledge Centre members (PDF format, 1.97MB).

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This item is part of What's New in Payments.