First to Support Secure Payments, Samples Now Available
AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France, October 7, 2008 – INSIDE Contactless, a leading provider of advanced, open-standard contactless chip technologies, today announced that samples of the first MicroPass® contactless prelam for use in mobile handset stickers for secure payments are now available for card manufacturers. INSIDE’s new sticker technology combines the award-winning MicroPass 4003 contactless payment platform – designed from the ground up to support open loop contactless payment applications – with a tuned RF antenna in a compact, shielded prelam for payment sticker applications. The contactless sticker form-factor is rapidly gaining popularity as a way to turn mobile phones, company IDs or just about anything else into a convenient payment device.
“Bank card issuers are very excited about enabling consumers to use their mobile phones to make payments using their credit and debit accounts, and stickers offer a promising bridge to introduce this capability in advance of NFC enabled mobile handsets that will have payment chips already built in,” said Charles Walton, executive vice president of payments for INSIDE Contactless. “Because stickers support prepaid debit as well as standard debit and credit accounts and can be attached to just about anything, they open the door to a variety of novel payment applications. We anticipate a lot of retailer and consumer innovation to occur with how these stickers are used.”
According to Walton, INSIDE anticipates that initial rollouts will start by end of 2008.
INSIDE’s innovative shielding design improves performance by protecting the chip and antenna inside the sticker from interference that might be caused by the radio signals used by mobile phones and other electronic devices. Since it was first launched at CARTES in November of 2005, the award-winning MicroPass intelligent payment platform has achieved its unprecedented success by continuing to deliver superior performance and flexibility, and is now the platform of choice for certified card manufacturers and issuers around the world.
"Contactless stickers offer a way to enable people to use their mobile phones today to make payments employing existing infrastructure,” said Shyam Krishnan, industry analyst, at Frost & Sullivan. "Contactless stickers like these from INSIDE can bridge the gap between the environment we find ourselves in today and mobile payments of the future."
