Coles supermarkets has begun trialling an NFC based payments and rewards system in their stores. In December 2011, Coles rolled out NFC point of sale terminals to all their stores giving them the infrastructure to launch the trial in conjunction with Mastercard, Vodafone, GE Capital Australia and NFC infrastructure company Gemalto.
The trial involves 60 participants, and sees users downloading the MasterCard Mobile Wallet app and linking their Flybuys account to the application. This allows them to purchase goods while accruing Flybuys points for each purchase. Owing to the lack of access to the secure element in Android phones, NFC enabled SIM cards are being used for the trial imitating those trials being conducted by ANZ and Westpac.
This latest NFC Payment system trial highlights the current lack of, and need for, an industry-wide standard for NFC payments. The overly-complicated route involving an NFC-enabled SIM card as seen in these trials could easily be solved by Google simply allowing access to the secure element in Android based phones. With Google’s seeming lack of interest in deploying Google Wallet outside of the US, it seems that this method is all we can currently look forward to in adopting NFC enabled SmartPhones as a method of payment.
Are you looking forward to one day using your NFC enabled phone to pay for goods and services?
Am I the only person who doesn’t care for wireless payment using my phone? I just don’t understand the attraction!
using google wallet like Canada would be nice
this is really good news to see a major supermarket and telco work together, but i know visa and vodafone are working on a mobile wallet together so im not to sure why mastercard is here, but if that means that i can buy a voadafone sim either outright or on a plan and then decided if i want to download the mastercard app or visa app and then the app just reads the details on the sim card. sorry if i carnt post links: http://australia.blog.visa.com/2012/11/20/introducing-vodafone-smartpass/ either way i think both optus and vodafone will launch NFC payments at april… Read more »
This would be awesome, even if I need to get a new SIM (hopefully Kogan will have some)
I would love to be able to you the NFC on my phone to make payments, and too access my building too. I could probably leave my actual wallet at home most of the time then.
I would *love* to be able to pay for stuff with my phone. Google, pull your heads out of your collective backsides. Please.
And yet again, Google fails to understand that there are countries outside of the U.S. Or at least let us know that they are interested in bringing this service to other countries.
It’s pathetic isn’t it.
Actually google arent allowed to bring wallet to australia right now. Privacy laws have been blocking it in australia, nz and germany for the past 12 months. There was meant to be an amendmant to this in january this year but seems it was blocked again.
Got any sources, that sounds fascinating to read about and probably frustrating to read about too
Link? / More info?
We would love to hear about some information to back up this statement. Drop us a line.
This is what I do for my job. There have been multiple attempts to get around this law (one is using this sim card method which in reality is 10 times harder and more costly than direct NFC payments). Obviously there has been more spent in USA than Australia for this (by massive amounts) but if there was open privacy laws like in USA, it would be up and running through the PayPass system which already exists in Australia.
Would love for you to email me about specifically which parts of the privacy act is contravened by NFC payments, daniel AT ausdroid dot net
Granted, I’ve not read the Privacy Act in great detail, but this doesn’t seem correct. I would love to be proven wrong though, so if you can send us some more information, please do 🙂
I was given to understand that there was limited access to the source code for the hardware that controls the NFC element.