EPC public consultation on mobile contactless card payments

11 January 2018

The EPC is running a public consultation on the Mobile Contactless SEPA Card Payments Implementation Interoperability Guidelines (MCP IIGs).

These guidelines aim to be a reference for all stakeholders working on mobile contactless payments in Europe (based on card payments).

With stakeholders from the mobile contactless payment industry, the EPC has updated the MCP IIGs. The last version was published in 2011, and a considerable update was needed to reflect new technologies and regulations.

Overview of the most significant updates:

• The guidelines previously only covered contactless mobile payments based on NFC (Near Field Communication) technology. Their scope has been extended to include new technical solutions such as:
  • Cloud-based HCE (Host Card Emulation – a software architecture that allows the emulation of a contactless card on the mobile device) solutions which have been introduced in many European countries over the past years as an alternative to Secure Element (SE)-based solutions. HCE does not require the usage of a secure element on the mobile device for the storage of sensitive data and enables a simpler mobile contactless card  payment ecosystem.
  • A new type of Secure Element, the eUICC (an embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card). In contrast to the well-known UICC (or SIM card), this is a new hardware version of a UICC which is non-removable and built-in within the mobile device by its manufacturer. It offers the user the possibility to change its mobile network operator over-the-air, without needing to physically change the embedded UICC itself.
• The concept of strong customer authentication as defined in PSD2 has been added to the document.
• The guidelines have also been enriched with an extensive set of mobile contactless payment use cases for illustrative purposes.
• New concepts such as ‘tokenisation’ and ‘payment card manager’ have been introduced.
• Finally, the guidelines are now aligned with recent standardisation work in the area (produced by EMVCo, GlobalPlatform and the European Cards Stakeholders Group).

The public consultation on the Mobile Contactless Card Payments Implementation Interoperability Guidelines is running until 26 January 2018.

Full news

© EPC