Juniper Research has just published a study on Mobile Payments, 2008-2013, which is announced in a press release. The report promises wonderful things, like $75 billion in yearly mobile payments by 2013. The author of the report, Howard Wilcox, is however quite cautious, and he is cited in the press release as saying:
Whilst trial results so far have been encouraging, the industry as a whole will need to convince both consumers and merchants of the merits of yet another payment mechanism on top of cash, cheques, credit and debit cards, and to allay understandable (even if unfounded) fears and scepticism about the security of The Mobile Wallet.
This is not really news, but it is a good reminder, with mixed news. The bad news is the one on which the smart card industry has little impact: a sound business model needs to emerge, with support from all actors. The good news is that security remains an issue, which is always positive for the smart card industry, whose main differentiator remains security.
However, a smart card isn’t everything, since mobile payment applications are likely to include interactions with the user, which will be performed through the phone. This means that the smart card industry, although they don’t like mobile phone security, need to prove that mobile phones provide the minimum level of security required for mobile payment.
This is also a very strong argument in favor of Java Card 3. By including the user interface in the card itself, the mobile software that needs to be trusted can be limited to the browser (and the underlying software layers), which is more or less the minimal subset one can expect.
Another argument in favor of smart cards in general and Java Card 3 in particular is the management of applications: GlobalPlatform provides a mature, secure, and widely available application management framework for cards, and there is no equivalent for mobile phones (this actually may be another important issue, possibly overlooked by the author of the report). If we consider Java Card 3, there is no need to deploy applications on the mobile phone: all payment-related software is on the card. Maybe not a killer argument, but this should definitely not neglected.
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