Alcatel-Lucent have announced an agreement to integrate CASSIS International’s Trusted Service Manager (TSM) with Alcatel-Lucent’s comprehensive mobile payment and marketing offering.  This solution is pre-integrated,  enabling mobile network operators (MNOs) to provide a secure mobile application warehouse for payment, ticketing, loyalty and other applications by allowing consumers to use their mobile phones as a wallet at the point of sale.

Mobile phones are being used as the new wallet everywhere, with mobile wallet users reaching 1.4 billion by 2015, predicted by Edgar, Dunn and company.  A consumer launches a credit card application on the Near Field Communications (NFC) phone and the phone will act as a credit card. The consumer will also have the possibility of checking his balance and transaction history in real time on the phone and will be able to subscribe to new payment, transport or loyalty programs on the fly by installing a secure application from the mobile warehouse.  In fact, Alcatel-Lucent’s survey revealed that 89 percent of the youth market would be willing to pay a monthly fee for such a mobile wallet service.

The Alcatel-Lucent and CASSIS partnership provides a single point of contact for the secure contactless application providers to access their customer base through the MNOs.  The CASSIS Trusted Service Manager distributes, provisions and activates the applications and services of the service providers, and is considered the middle man between MNOs and third party service providers. This allows a mobile phone to act like a credit card, transport card or loyalty card. MNOs can leverage the relationship and services of the TSM to collaborate with other industry service providers and rapidly create new services for their customers, independent of handset and secure element makers, and thereby creating new revenue streams.

This joint solution highlights further progress with Alcatel-Lucent’s application enablement strategy, which combines the trusted capabilities of service providers with the speed and innovation of the Web to enable a new generation of services that provides both consumers and business users with richer experiences. Mobile service providers can safely expose network assets and access to handset secured elements, such as identity management, to third parties such as banks, and other application and content providers to create innovative secure mobile  applications that utilize the mobile operator’s network  and handset  capabilities. This further drives availability of new applications via the creation of a secured  mobile  application  warehouse.

Alcatel-Lucent offers a complete solution to MNOs for proximity payments and mobile financial services including a “stored value account” (wallet), payment gateway to banks and credit cards, an e-money license, credit card issuing and acquiring licenses and profile server. CASSIS’ TSM services provide an mobile application warehouse where consumers can download secure applications to their NFC handset.  CASSIS’ world class expertise in TSM offers over-the-air provision that remotely manages multiple secure mobile applications such as debit or credit card payment applications on the secure element, independent of its form factor, such as, Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards, MicroSD cards, active stickers, and NFC phone with embedded secure element.

“This partnership completes our turnkey mobile payment and marketing offering for mobile operators and NFC consortia,” said Anthony Belpaire, General Manager Alcatel-Lucent Mobile Wallet Service. “The combination of CASSIS’ unique expertise on TSM with Alcatel-Lucent’s Mobile Wallet Service offering, worldwide presence and integration expertise creates a unique market proposition. With this offering, we can enable our mobile carrier customers to provide a kind of “SIM app store” so payment, ticketing and lots of 3rd party applications can be provided to any NFC handset into the hands of the carriers’ customers.“

“Consumers get their freedom of choice from the secure application mobile super-store,” said Thian Yee Chua, CEO of CASSIS International. “We shared the vision of Alcatel-Lucent. Combining its leadership in the telecommunication industry with our experience and track record in other industries shortens the learning curve for mobile operators, while speeding up their service deployment, and making NFC business profitable.”