MasterCard Selects Cryptomathic for OTA Data Preparation

MasterCard PayPass is a contactless payment application that allows consumers to quickly and conveniently purchase goods and services at outlets where contactless payment terminals have been installed by merchants. The new PayPass offering enables consumers to make small-item purchases with a tap of their mobile phone. Once a bank has signed up to offer the service, its customers can register for the service with MasterCard, who, on behalf of the bank, will issue the PayPass application over-the-air directly onto the customers’ mobile phone handset.

The Mobile Over The Air Provisioning Service (MOTAPS) is operated and managed entirely by MasterCard, with the exception of the data preparation system which is performed by Cryptomathic’s CardInk. This solution will generate the personalisation data for MasterCard PayPass mobile phone applications provisioned through this service, ensuring a highly secure environment for data generation and cryptographic key management during the application issuing process.

DnB NOR, Norway’s largest financial services group is the first user of the service, offering its customers the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of mobile contactless payments.

James Anderson, vice president, Mobile, MasterCard Worldwide, comments: “MasterCard has established the Mobile Over-the-Air Provisioning Service, the world’s first and only NFC program platform of its kind. It is a robust solution that enables the issuer to capture more mobile payments and seize greater market share through innovation – quickly, at low cost and with vastly reduced effort. The Cryptomathic CardInk product has been chosen as the only external element to this service, as it provides MasterCard with an industry-leading data generation solution, which is highly secure, efficient and scalable to future programme requirements.”

Peter Landrock, Executive Chairman of Cryptomathic, comments: “We are delighted to deliver CardInk for the MasterCard PayPass mobile phone offering. MasterCard has been using the Cryptomathic key management system since 1998, and our work together has helped develop CardInk into the sophisticated solution available today. The team looks forward to supporting MasterCard in the secure and successful deployment of this advanced payment application to end-users.”

Cryptomathic CardInk is the only major system that is both Hardware Security Module (HSM) vendor and card platform independent, ensuring flexibility for any card issuing environment. With CardInk, all data generation and preparation takes place inside a tamper resistant HSM, making it one of the most secure solutions currently available.