GLOBAL – Money got truly mobile this week with the announcement of the new Nokia Lumia 610 NFC, certified with MasterCard PayPass technology that means you can just choose what you want to buy, tap – and go.

If you live in Europe or North America, you might already be familiar with PayPass terminals in shops and food stores. Soon you’ll be able to tap your Lumia 610 NFC against the terminal, instead of your credit or bank card. 

James Anderson, MasterCard’s Group Head and Senior Vice President of Mobile Product Development, talked us through it:

“We’ve been working with Nokia since 2005 as founding members of the NFC Forum, and we are delighted to certify the Nokia Lumia 610 NFC. Over the years we’ve worked with Nokia on a number of pilots, and now we’re pleased to see this progress on a commercial scale.” 

Anderson stressed that people find NFC technology interesting when they can use it for something essential – like payment: “That’s when features like this come to life.”

The phone has a built-in NFC chip and new antenna. The signal from the POS terminal is sent to a secure element on the phone – usually a SIM chip – which hosts the PayPass application – and which generates data back to the POS terminal. 

 

 

The MasterCard certification process checks the performance of the phone hardware to ensure that the speed of the transaction is fast enough, and the read range – so that the signal can be read at a specific distance from the terminal.  

But if you’re out and about using your phone for payments, you may not care how the technology is put together and certified. You just want to know how to use it, and if it’s secure. 

James Anderson explains that customers will go through their bank to set-up their credit card on their phone. A bank must use only certified devices to run PayPass, like the Nokia Lumia 610 NFC. Once you’ve set your card up, you just touch your phone near the PayPass terminal, and go.

“Whenever you’re dealing with money, people will have concerns about security,” Anderson says, “but we are a trusted brand and we have built our security from the ground up, using the secure element in the phone, to ensure that PayPass is safe, secure and simple.”   

 

 

Customers get the same benefits and liability guarantees as if they were using a card. Once people have a good user experience, their concerns about security rapidly diminish, he added. 

Possibly all you need to know is that with more than 425,000 PayPass terminals in over 40 countries – using your Nokia Lumia 610 NFC certified for PayPass by MasterCard should make life easier, faster and more fluid.