Membership Doubles In Mobile Payment Forum As First All Member Meeting Gets Underway
Wakefield, MA (ots)
Four Working Groups Formed To Advance Initial Activities For Secure Mobile Payment
Membership of the Mobile Payment Forum has doubled since the beginning of the year and now stands at 89 organizations from around the world, representing the mobile, technology and financial services industries.
The Mobile Payment Forum is a member driven organization that seeks to achieve broad industry cooperation to standardize the building blocks needed to deploy secure and convenient mobile commerce solutions.
The growing membership base was announced at the first plenary meeting of the Forum held in Genval Belgium from February 27 to 28. A total of 108 people representing 66 member companies attended the event and four working groups were formed to start addressing specific m-commerce issues such as cardholder authentication, device and transport security, and consumer convenience and usability. These groups will look specifically at:
- SIM toolkit authentication - this group will define a standard SIM (subscriber identification module) toolkit application to enable the personalization of third party keys on the SIM, and enable the utilization of these keys.
- Personalization of multi-application clients - this group will examine the requirements for personalizing payment data and applications on multi-application mobile phones.
- Wallet form fill - this group will look at the requirements for form filling to enable convenient payments on mobile devices.
- Security user experience - this group will look at how security rocesses for mobile payments will affect the user experience and will develop best practices.
In addition to the working groups, the Forum's technical committee steering group and member committee convened to discuss strategic organizational initiatives and plans for 2002.
"The inaugural plenary meeting accomplished some key objectives," said Simon Pugh, co-president of the Mobile Payment Forum. "Work was started in each of the four initial working groups as well as in the member committee. Activity proposals and working group charters were developed, work plans defined, and action items identified. With increasing membership and extensive participation, the Mobile Payment Forum is in a great position to create the industry standards necessary to support secure and convenient mobile payment services."
Mauro Sentinelli, managing director, Telecom Italia Mobile, said: "This inaugural meeting of the Forum has successfully demonstrated the need and value of the organization and the importance of cooperation between the financial and mobile industries. It has set a firm foundation upon which we can start to define the building blocks needed to create common, widely accepted standards for secure mobile payments. There is much work to be done but we are off to a good start."
As a member driven organization, the Mobile Payment Forum seeks to address the requirements of both the mobile and financial industries. Member organizations are strongly encouraged to develop activity proposals that tackle immediate and longer-term business needs for secure mobile payments.
Membership of the Mobile Payment Forum is tiered, allowing interested parties to join as either Principal or Associate members. Any organization with an interest in facilitating secure m-commerce is eligible to join. For more information, visit www.mobilepaymentforum.org
Note To Editors:
The following organization have joined the Mobile Payment Forum since February 2002:
ACI Worldwide AIB Group Airborne Entertainment Altamedius Association for Payment Clearing Services Atos Origin Barclaycard Citigroup Consult Hyperion Credit Mutuel Discretix Technologies Edgar, Dunn & Company Encorus Technologies Erste Bank EURO Kartensysteme GmgH Gemplus Hitachi Ltd Hutchison 3G Group inatec Gmbh ING J-PHONE Co Ltd MMO2 MobileWay Oracle Orange France SA Promisant Ltd. Rabobank Nederland Royal Bank of Scotland Schlumberger SiCap Ltd. SK Telecom Symbol Technologies TeleCash Kommunikations Service GmbH Telecom Italia Mobile S.p.A. Transaction Network Services, Inc. TSI Telecommunications VeriSign WiNAG.com ZIM Technologies
For a complete listing of all 89 Forum members, please visit www.mobilepaymentforum.org/members.htm
About the Mobile Payment Forum
The Mobile Payment Forum brings together leading organizations from the mobile and financial industries to create a foundation for standardized, secure and authenticated mobile payments. Founders American Express Company, JCB Co., Ltd., MasterCard International and Visa International all bring extensive experience in creating interoperable global payment standards and specifications and a knowledge of payments in emerging channels. Membership will include key financial institutions, telecommunications operators, wireless-device manufacturers, merchants, content providers and software and hardware developers and vendors. The Mobile Payment Forum is a non-profit membership organization, incorporated in the state of Delaware in the United States.
For further information and a list of members, visit the Mobile Payment Forum Web site at www.mobilepaymentforum.org
Contact:
Margot Benoit
Mobile Payment Forum
Media Inquiries
Phone +1/781/876-6299
E-Mail: pressoffice@mobilepaymentforum.org
Denise Snyder
Mobile Payment Forum
Membership Inquiries
Phone +1/781/876-8840
E-Mail: membership@mobilepaymentforum.org