NFC SD crew gives up: No one wants our safe bonking tool

When it comes to secure mobe transactions, 2 options are enough

The NFC SD consortium - a collaboration attempting to capitalise on the use of removable memory to secure pay-by-bonk transactions - has called it a day seeing that no one wants to secure transactions using a Secure Digital (SD) card.

The investment, which NFC Times pegs at €3m, came mostly from Giesecke & Devrient but with €900K coming from Phison Electronics. The intention was to provide secure micro SD cards for NFC payments, initially with an integrated NFC antenna, then later using the phone's antenna over the Single Wire Protocol. But the industry is moving towards embedded and SIM-based secure elements, leaving NFC company Device Fidelity holding the flag for removable memory.

The shelving of the plan, which involves bringing staff back in-house and ending the collaboration, isn't that surprising given the way that SD cards have fallen out of favour as secure elements, with embedded and SIM-based options now becoming dominant.

Pay-by-bonk requires two distinct pieces of technology: 1) a radio standard by which the bonking of a phone onto a pad can trigger a transaction (for which Near Field Communications is used), and 2) a secure element with cryptographic tokens to authenticate the user while being entirely separate from the (implicitly insecure) phone OS.

Network operators want the secure element in the SIM, under their control, and have contrived the Single Wire Protocol to connect the SIM to the NFC antenna in the handset, so a customer changing handset can take their bank cards with them seamlessly. Handset manufacturers, conversely, want the secure element in the phone so customers can change network operators seamlessly.

Many banks wanted a third way - a secure element in a removable Micro SD card, with its own antenna or using the SWP, so the customer could change network operators, and handsets, while taking their banking details with them.

It’s a battle for ownership of the customer, and one which the banks have largely lost. The banks had an early lead, deploying large-scale trials only hampered by the iPhone's lack of SD card slot (there's a demographic overlap between iPhone owners and those interested in paying by bonk, enough to prompt several trials using iPhone cases with SD slots in them).

The withdrawal of Giesecke & Devrient isn't the end of the matter, SD Cards will still be pushed by some, but in most markets the question now comes down to whether the secure element should be owned by the network operator (Vodafone, O2, EE) or the platform owner (Apple, Google, BlackBerry), or an unhappy combination of the two. ®