20 Nov 2015 at 14:16 | By Sarah Evans
Author: James Stewart
One of the most common questions we get asked here at Semble is why we only support the phones we do or why a particular phone won’t work. To help you understand, we’d like to give you the inside story on why a device makes it onto our ‘whitelist’ and the reasons why some phones can’t be added.
Of course the answer isn’t as straight forward as you’d expect. There are three key elements that determine Semble phone compatibiity – certification & standards, OS (Operating System) updates and SIM card communication. Each of these play a vital role in ensuring our users get the best experience possible and that Semble is a safe, secure and reliable alternative to your plastic cards when paying at a contactless terminal or a Snapper reader.
We’ll be covering these off in a 3-part blog series direct from the Semble Lab.
Part 1 – Certification & Standards
Don’t roll your eyes just yet! This is a really important part of any mobile wallet eco-system. It keeps things safe and secure and provides the ubiquity in the customer experience necessary to drive adoption. I promise I’ll keep it brief.
In order for Semble to work there are multiple international & local standards, and certifications that we must comply with. Being a mobile wallet these span both mobile and card provider platforms and require collaboration between multiple parties and vendors (often non-traditional partners).
Let me tell you, there are a lot of them! From a certification perspective the main ones relate to the payment card schemes (Visa & MasterCard). This includes standards from bodies such as EMVCo, Global Platform etc. The purpose of these is to ensure the robust security of the solution, in much the same way as for physical payment chip cards today. From a standards perspective as it relates to the phone, these are covered by mobile telecom standards bodies such as 3GPP, ETSI, GSMA, which enable the phone to communicate with the payment terminal in a standardised and secure fashion.
When you overlay all of these requirements the bottom line is, we can’t approve every NFC enabled phone in New Zealand. Parallel imports, rooted phones, they’re all off the table. Despite this we now have over 37 different phone types across multiple brands (Samsung, Sony, LG, Huawei and HTC) that are compatible with Semble. At last count meant that over 1.2M Kiwis with a compatible phone. That’s nearly 30% of Kiwis who have a phone eligible to Semble. Not a bad start for New Zealand.
We’ll be back next week to take you through how an operating system update impacts here at the Semble Lab.
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