The EPC released its white paper on mobile payments for a three-month public consultation. This document aims to contribute to the evolution of an integrated market for mobile payments across the SEPA.
Mobile phones in Europe have achieved full market penetration and offer rich services, including for daily payments. According to the GSM Association, smartphones now account for 60% of the connections in developed markets. They are, therefore, an ideal channel for SEPA payment instruments (credit transfers, direct debits, cards).
Though paying with a mobile device (for proximity and remote payments) is becoming more and more frequent, SEPA is still at the early days of a complete harmonisation of mobile payments. The aim of this harmonisation is to reach a more uniform and improved consumer and merchant experience in an integrated market. This would be beneficial in terms of convenience, cost-effectiveness, trust, and competitiveness.
The EPC’s white paper aims to inform stakeholders, including payment service providers, mobile network operators, merchants and any interested party, about the EPC’s commitment to an integrated market for mobile payments in SEPA. It further endeavours to offer a better insight into the potential of the mobile channel to build on SEPA payment instruments.
In its overview of mobile payments for SEPA, the white paper includes information about cutting-edge areas and players of mobile payments. The EPC has considerably updated the white paper since its last release in 2012, in order to include new types of mobile proximity payments (such as those based on Quick Response – QR- code), while addressing also the new technologies that entered the mobile ecosystem, e.g. Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology, enabling mobile devices to emulate a contactless card, or tokenisation (i.e. the usage of payment ‘tokens’ –substitutes- instead of real payer related account data in payment transactions), and the new stakeholders which entered the market.
The document is written in a non-technical style in order to be accessible to all stakeholders. The EPC welcomes all interested stakeholders' input on the information presented in this white paper, until 1 September 2016.
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