Moversa Debuts Universal NFC Chip

All parties stand to gain, both financially and through customer loyalty, by supporting the technology. But with little in the way of a roadmap to follow, adoption is slow (see Could NFC Fail to Take Off?). What's more, all of the development work to build NFC capability into cell phones has involved handsets using GSM cellular technology. Many phones in the United States are based on CDMA cellular technology, but no NFC-enabled CDMA phones have yet hit the market. However, Inside Contactless, a manufacturer of NFC chips, announced this week a partnership with Qualcomm, which produces CDMA chipsets used in cell phones. The partnership could signal that a CDMA NFC handset will soon become a reality.

Aside from the strong push toward NFC in England, Paris is also moving toward the technology through NFC trials. Carrefour, a French chain of hypermarkets (which combine a supermarket and department store in a single facility), has begun accepting RFID and NFC payments and is issuing a new store payment card known as Pass—an RFID-enabled version of its existing branded credit/debit card. The Pass card contains a Mifare chip and supports MasterCard PayPass contactless payments.

Collins says he is encouraged to see Carrefour putting a stake in the ground by offering the new RFID (or contactless, as the technology is referred to in the payment industry) options. "We've been trying to explain for a while the potential around bringing contactless into the retail space," he states, "because retailers can leverage it for better customer relationship management, improved loyalty [and] better [payment] services."

More importantly, Carrefour has also joined with a number of other French retailers, as well as those companies' financial services partners and three cellular carriers—Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom—to advance the rollout of NFC technology in France. By Christmas 2009, the firms hope to begin large-scale pilot programs that will enable consumers with cell phone accounts from the three carriers to use their mobile phones to pay for purchases in the retailers' stores, as well as to receive and redeem mobile coupons, and to replace their existing store cards with virtual loyalty cards running on their phones.

The phones used in these pilots by French consumers may contain the new USAM chip, as Moversa indicates it plans to begin sampling the product to selected customers during mid-2009.