Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) announced today its collaboration with Aconite to provide a service that securely delivers and remotely manages applications for consumer's NFC (Near Field Communications) enabled mobile phones.
Banks wishing to issue contactless mobile payments applications are the service's primary market. Other markets include organizations issuing access, ID, loyalty, ticketing and proximity marketing applications. Aconite is a leading provider of software and consulting services for managing business applications on chips in smart cards, tokens or mobiles.
Together, Ericsson and Aconite will offer application issuers a turnkey solution for distributing innovative mobile-based products to their customers and for refreshing those products, whenever necessary, to maintain a competitive edge. This solution is a fast track to the market, offering a route with much lower risk and capital-investment than an in-house solution. It is based on the integration of the Aconite Mobile Application Manager™ with the Ericsson Trusted Service Manager (TSM) service, through GlobalPlatform standard interfaces.
This collaborative solution enables an issuer to create a security domain within the secure element (of any type) in the NFC handset and to load, personalize, update or delete applets on that domain. All with very little impact on legacy banking systems.
The Aconite Mobile Application Manager is standard compliant with GlobalPlatform standard messaging interfaces, which ensures that the issuers' data is always isolated from the mobile infrastructure and maintained securely within the Aconite Mobile Application Manager environment. The Ericsson-Aconite collaboration also enables issuers to transfer data between their security domains within secure elements and Aconite Mobile Application Manager, in order to manage payment transactions, EMV scripts, prepaid top-ups and other transactions securely and privately.
Patrick Regester, Aconite's SVP Sales & Marketing, said "Our collaboration with Ericsson lets us offer retail financial institutions, of all sizes, the opportunity to give their customers innovative, world-class mobile payments services economically and without delay. Aconite is very pleased to be working with such a reputable global leader as Ericsson. We are very confident that issuers taking advantage of the opportunity to launch mobile payments products will receive excellent service and derive significant benefits".
Richard Anell, head of Ericsson's IPX business, commented "Aconite has an excellent reputation and experience with their proven smart card management product, and have demonstrated its reliability and functional flexibility in industrial scale production use. The Ericsson TSM platform lowers the barriers of entry to the contactless ecosystem for issuers. We feel this collaboration is a winning combination and look forward to meeting financial institutions' requirements in the mobile payments space".