Membership of the Mobile Payment Forum has doubled since the beginning of the year and now stands at 89 organisations from around the world, representing the mobile, technology and financial services industries.
The Forum was created by the major credit card companies as a cross industry group to enable secure, user-friendly mobile payment transactions independent of device, network operator or financial services provider.
Work is now underway following the first plenary meeting of the Forum, held in Genval Belgium at the end of February. A total of 108 people representing 66 member companies attended the event and four working groups were formed to start addressing specific m-commerce issues such as cardholder authentication, device and transport security, and consumer convenience and usability.
These groups will look specifically at:
* SIM toolkit authentication - defining a standard SIM (subscriber identification module) toolkit application to enable the personalisation of third party keys on the SIM, and enable the utilisation of these keys;
* Personalisation of multi-application clients - examining the requirements for personalising payment data and applications on multi-application mobile phones;
* Wallet form fill - this group will look at the requirements for form filling to enable convenient payments on mobile devices; and
* Security user experience - looking at how security processes for mobile payments will affect the user experience and will develop best practices.
In addition to the working groups, the Forum's technical committee steering group and member committee convened to discuss strategic organisational initiatives and plans for 2002.
Mauro Sentinelli, managing director, Telecom Italia Mobile, adds: "This inaugural meeting of the Forum has successfully demonstrated the need and value of the organisation and the importance of cooperation between the financial and mobile industries. It has set a firm foundation upon which we can start to define the building blocks needed to create common, widely accepted standards for secure mobile payments."