Banking Group to Set RFID Roadmap

According to FSTC, four of its members—banks comprising four of the top five financial institutions in the United States—requested that the organization develop standardized processes for employing RFID in the financial services industry. That request was the impetus for initiating the SIG.

Thus far, the SIG has identified a number of guideposts for developing a standardized approach to using RFID. The group needs to determine a uniform numbering scheme, so banks across the industry will be able to use a common means of creating the unique identifiers encoded to RFID tags. It also wants to settle on a single type of tag—that is, to specify the tag's radio frequency and air-interface protocol. Moreover, the SIG needs to determine a common tag-placement location on such things as documents, magnetic tape and other data storage media, as well as the locking bags used to transport these types of assets.

According to Fricke, the EPC Gen 2 UHF passive tag standard is most likely what the financial services industry will adopt for its needs, though that is not yet set in stone. "We are leaning in that direction [of Gen 2], but we are still doing a lot of research," he says, adding that the FSTC and EPCglobal are members of each other's organizations. "But at the upcoming meeting, we will be looking at all options—the idea is to narrow the scope down."

In the future, the SIG plans to focus on ways in which RFID can be used in a manner similar to how banks currently employ bar codes to track everything from documents to IT assets. It does not intend, however, to examine RFID use in payment applications, such as those utilizing mobile devices or payment cards containing RFID tags complying with Near Field Communication (NFC) standards.